‘Napoleon was a wild beast in a cage’: battle of Waterloo artefacts go on display
|
Version 0 of 1. Napoleon was in surprisingly chirpy form in July 1814, though he had been defeated in war, lost his imperial crown, and was in exile on the island of Elba. Unknown to his English visitor, whose account of the “gaiety and gentlemanlike” meeting goes on display for the first time on Thursday, he was planning the escape which would lead to his last stand at Waterloo a year later. The letter, along with another vivid account written on the battlefield – “the escape of Lord Wellington is next to a miracle, for he was exposed the whole day to the hottest fire” – go on display in an exhibition which the current Duke of Wellington will open at Cambridge University library. It includes previously unpublished first-hand accounts of the events, military drill books, satirical cartoons, Napoleon’s copy of the essays of Montaigne from his last exile on St Helena, and material showing how he terrified but enthralled the English, including a poster for the Imax of the day, The Battle of Waterloo at the Panorama theatre in Leicester Square – a painting so successful that the artist, Henry Aston Barker, retired after creating it. Battlefield souvenirs include a musket ball, and a scrap of charred timber from Hougoumont, the farmhouse at the centre of the fighting, both collected by a teenage tourist years after the battle. Co-curator John Wells said the importance of Waterloo was recognised immediately and by subsequent generations, with the poets Byron and Tennyson describing it as “an earthquake”. “Waterloo is the most famous battle in modern European history, and from the very first moment soldiers and civilians alike wanted to put their experiences and emotions into words,” he said. When William Crackanthorpe wrote to his sister Sarah in 1814, Europe thought Napoleon had been caged and tamed. On arrival at Elba with other English tourists, they applied to General Bertrand – “a very distinguished military character and who has followed his master in all his misfortunes” – for an interview with Napoleon. At nine the following night they were led through a suite of rooms in the citadel to a garden overlooking the sea, “where we were most courteously received by Buonaparte … he kept us in conversation about an hour, speaking generally upon indifferent subjects but with a gaiety and gentlemanlike manner which quite astonished me as we were all in uniform.” He asked avidly about the English militia – “in all the details of which he seemed much better informed than any of us” – and teased one of the ladies as unpatriotic for wearing a French silk gown. I congratulate myself that I have been presented to the man who made Europe tremble for so many years Crackanthorpe, a cousin of the poet William Wordsworth, wrote that Napoleon rose every morning at 4am, and had set about improvements on Elba including cutting new roads, converting a church into a theatre, which shocked the locals, and raising taxes. “At intervals, though, he seemed to relapse into a kind of reverie, when his countenance assumed that fiendish appearance, which the light of the moon which shone upon it perhaps rendered more horrid than it otherwise was, and I doubt not that he breathed vengeance within himself against us for having come to see him in his humility. Our audience was however most gracious and although I only saw him as a wild beast in his cage, I nevertheless congratulate myself that I have been presented to the man who made Europe tremble for so many years and who so nearly accomplished his grand object of universal domination.” Eight months later, Napoleon was free – back in power for what became known as his Hundred Days, and gathering the great army that would fight at Waterloo on June 18 1815. Wellington himself described the battle as “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life”, and the exhausted Captain William Turnor, writing the following morning from “The Field of Battle 10 miles from Bruxelles”, described it as “the most bloody as well as the most decisive battle that has been fought since the commencement of the French revolution … The Cannonade was horrendous on both sides. The French fought with desperation and I am fully convinced that no troops on Earth except the English could have won the victory, they are in action savagely courageous.” He noted that some dragoons were said to have hung back, and one regiment of hussars had even refused to charge, while in contrast Napoleon “shewed the greatest courage; led in person many charges both of infantry and cavalry”. “The field of Battle exhibits this morning a most shocking spectacle too dreadful to describe … Those officers who were in the Peninsula describe the battles there as mere combats in comparison with that of yesterday.” He broke off as his regiment marched off, “so overcome with fatigue” that he finished the letter four days later. Napoleon was exiled to the remote island of St Helena, where he died in 1821 aged 51; Wellington died in 1852, at 83. Meanwhile, Waterloo grew rich on tourism: an English visitor, Michael Egerton, described how locals spotting foreigners “would feign an anxious and diligent search on the ground” before triumphantly producing buttons and other scraps and insisting they were battle relics. |