Two hundred years after Wellington’s famous victory, a new display at Windsor Castle explores the battle that changed Europe for good. Richard Nye looks back at Napoleon’s final fling
It was the pivotal point of the century: the moment when a restless, fractious continent briefly put its weary sword to bed. War – religious, revolutionary, territorial – had long been Europe’s dominant motif. But in 1815, on the battlefield at Waterloo, the tide turned.
Waterloo may have been – as the British commander, the Duke of Wellington, famously remarked – “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life”, but the victory for the Anglo-Prussian forces, on June 18, proved to be the final nail in the Napoleonic coffin. Soon Napoleon himself, Emperor of the French and colossus of the age, would be on his way to permanent exile, leaving Europe to a century of comparative calm.
This year, to mark the bicentenary of these climactic events, Windsor Castle is staging the exhibition Waterloo at Windsor: 1815 – 2015, combining a themed trail through the state apartments with a display of drawings, prints and archival material exploring the battle and its aftermath. Highlights include objects seized on the battlefield by the victors, including silver, weapons and – the pièce de résistance – a gorgeous red cloak belonging to Napoleon himself, presented to George IV by the Prussian Field-Marshal von Blücher.
Waterloo, of course, was more than just a single, strident chord. It was, in fact, the rousing crescendo of the so-called Hundred Days: the final, tumultuous movement in the symphony of the Napoleonic Wars.
Defeated in April 1814, and exiled to the Italian isle of Elba, Napoleon spent the next 10 months brooding watchfully while Europe’s victorious Great Powers – Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia – debated at the Congress of Vienna how best to reorder the world. The Congress was the Versailles of its day – and, as the Paris peacemakers would find a century later, shattered pieces of the continental kaleidoscope can be hard to rearrange. The triumphant quartet quarrelled; and Napoleon, under cover of the mass distraction, slipped away from Elba and took hopeful ship for France.
Landing at Antibes on March 1, the returning exile marched north, gathering troops as he went. France quivered uncertainly in the fleeting Napoleonic spring, as much from excitement as from fear – for the royalist restoration of 1814 had not proved popular. Paris lay open; and, on March 20, Napoleon strode in.
Alarmed at this resurgence, the Great Powers united to outlaw Napoleon and began mobilising for war. By June Britain and Prussia, under Wellington and Blücher, were ready for the fray. But with Austria and Russia still preparing, July 1 was chosen as the date for an invasion of France.
Napoleon now faced a dilemma: whether to use the extra time for strengthening and then dig in for a defensive campaign, or to launch a pre-emptive strike before his enemies were all fully assembled. By destroying at least some of the opposing armies, he might thereby force the nations to the table and secure a favourable peace. Predictably, he decided to attack; and, in an eerie foreshadowing of summers yet to come, his chosen ground was a place then part of the Netherlands: Belgium.
On June 15, the French crossed the Sambre. Initial success against Blücher emboldened Napoleon, and on June 17 he began to pursue Wellington towards Brussels. That night, however, the retreating British turned and took up a position on a ridge about one mile south of Waterloo. Next day, all the waves and breakers of Napoleonic fury washed over them, as hour succeeded midsummer hour. A desperate Wellington willed his Prussian allies to arrive. “Give me night or give me Blücher,” he is said to have prayed.
In the end, it was Blücher that saved him: the Prussians took the field towards evening and the combined forces routed the French. Napoleon now left the army to his Marshals and returned to Paris to shore up political support. But the bubble had burst. On June 22, a chastened Emperor abdicated again and two weeks later Prussian troops entered the capital, bringing the Hundred Days to an end. Napoleon headed for the coast, but a Royal Navy blockade cut off his escape. Finally, on July 15, he surrendered and was carted off into South Atlantic exile.
This time there would be no return.
Peace came dropping slow. For the next 99 years, European wars were largely limited in time and scope, as diplomats and statesmen weaved and bobbed to maintain the precarious balance of power. Not until 1914, when the shots of Sarajevo rang out and troops once more came stomping across Belgian soil, did the continent meet its next Waterloo. By then, the long nineteenth century peace had brought complacency to many Europeans. A century on from Waterloo, they had become like the bees in Keats’s Ode to Autumn: “They think warm days will never cease, for Summer has o’erbrimmed their clammy cells.”
Waterloo at Windsor: 1815 – 2015 continues at Windsor Castle until January 2016
