On 26 July 1815, Lieutenant-Colonel Augustus Frazer of the Royal Artillery, a Peninsular and Waterloo veteran, entered Notre Dame Cathedral. Like thousands of other British soldiers, post-Waterloo, he was taking advantage of the sights of Paris, and he was on a Napoleonic tourist trail. One of the must see sights was Notre Dame, not least because of the imperial coronation regalia it housed. A year earlier, with Wellington's army in the south-west of France, Frazer had written of Napoleon: ‘how one hates his name, which should be forgotten’. Now, standing before Napoleon's imperial trappings, Frazer could not help himself. As he wrote to his wife: ‘To be very impudent, and to the infinite horror of the grave man who showed me the regalia, I put the laurel crown on my head.’Footnote 1
The public image, myth, and memory of Napoleon in nineteenth-century France – the commonly called Napoleonic Legend – has attracted great scholarly interest over the years.Footnote 2 The Legend was fashioned from the time of Napoleon's Italian campaigns of the late 1790s and grew during his rise and fall. Following his death in 1821, the publication of the Memorial of Saint Helena reaffirmed the Legend of the child of the Revolution, the saviour of France, the military genius, and the lawmaker to Europe, to which was now wedded the suffering Prometheus on the rock of St Helena. Operating alongside this during the war and beyond was the counter-mythology of the ‘Black Legend’, which was especially prominent in the British press.Footnote 3 Yet, notwithstanding some old collections of British wartime broadsides and earlier studies of Napoleon's Whig admirers (especially Holland House),Footnote 4 only in recent decades have scholars explored more deeply attitudes to Napoleon in late Georgian Britain.Footnote 5 In particular, Stuart Semmel has shown the diverse meanings that Napoleon held for the British, and highlighted the shifting and often sympathetic portrayal of Napoleon amongst British radical writers during and immediately after the Napoleonic Wars. For Britons, Napoleon's political, religious, and national character proved difficult to define in any fixed or stable way: Corsican or French, democrat or despot, usurper or legitimate ruler, Catholic or something very different?Footnote 6 All this challenged antithetical conceptions of France, whether the recent Revolutionary France of the radical Jacobin Republic, or the traditional Catholic and Absolutist ‘Other’ of the Old Regime, a theme so central to Linda Colley's seminal work on the development of British national identity over the long eighteenth century.Footnote 7 What is emerging is that the figure of Napoleon occupied a much more complex and enigmatic place in the British imagination than the Black Legend of British wartime propaganda would suggest. Years of anti-Napoleonic propaganda, Simon Burrows concludes, ‘failed to dispel a sneaking liberal admiration for Bonaparte’.Footnote 8
Yet where Napoleon sits with the early nineteenth-century British people more generally still remains sketchy.Footnote 9 This is even truer of attitudes within the very institution fighting Napoleon – the British army. Focusing on the letters, diaries, and memoirs of officers and enlisted men from the Peninsular and Waterloo campaigns, this article explores British soldiers’ perceptions of Napoleon during the war years and beyond. Historians are blessed here with a relatively large and rich body of soldiers’ writings, many of which have been published.Footnote 10 Indeed, this epoch was a transformative moment in the history of personal war narratives.Footnote 11 With unprecedented numbers of men mobilized for war, never before had so many soldiers recorded their military experiences in letters and diaries; and with expanding print culture and reading audiences, a great wave of memoirs written by junior officers and enlisted men appeared for the first time before the public.Footnote 12 Educated gentlemen officers wrote the vast majority of accounts, with perhaps only 50 per cent of the rank-and-file signature literate.Footnote 13 Nevertheless, we find writers amongst common soldiers, a number of whom produced post-war memoirs. Traditionally mined by military historians for campaign details, these writings are increasingly opening up to broader social and cultural investigation.Footnote 14
Across these sources, we find that soldiers often formed mixed and ambivalent views of Napoleon, with Napoleon appearing as a multi-dimensional figure of fascination and awe, both loathed and admired. At one level, this corresponds with a range of attitudes within Britain, highlighting the important connections between soldiers and domestic culture. But soldiers, as a distinct cohort, also add a new dimension to British understandings of Napoleon. As military men, they were especially interested in Napoleon as a military commander, but also the nature of Napoleon's army, especially its meritocratic principles and honours system – themes yet to be explored in nineteenth-century British views of Napoleon. Soldiers’ interests also extended beyond the military sphere to include Napoleon's religious and legal reforms. Whilst there was a diversity of British domestic opinion on Napoleon and religion, the experience of Spain convinced British soldiers that Napoleon in this regard was ultimately a force for good.
Importantly, soldiers’ perceptions of Napoleon add to our understanding of soldiers’ writing practices, especially their cultural context and the differences between wartime writing and post-war memoirs. A diverse and shifting set of cultural frameworks and lived experiences shaped soldiers’ writing practices on Napoleon – from the Black Legend and Napoleonic Legend, to the Enlightenment and Romanticism; and from Spain and its battlefields to Restoration Paris and post-Waterloo Britain. Tracing the evolution of British soldiers’ perceptions of Napoleon from the letters and diaries of the war years through to memoirs across the nineteenth century reveals a growing admiration of Napoleon and the increasing hold of the Napoleonic Legend.
Finally, the question of Napoleon also sheds light on patriotism, national identity, and ‘Britishness’ within the army. Modern studies have highlighted the multi-faceted nature of regimental, national, and transnational forms of identity amongst British soldiers. The British army was genuinely ‘British’ in composition, with approximately half of its forces comprising Englishmen (the ‘Welsh’ were listed as English), one third Irish and one sixth Scottish.Footnote 15 The army was able to accommodate and foster a multiplicity of internal national identities, whilst simultaneously acting as a melting pot for a more inclusive Britishness.Footnote 16 All soldiers took an oath to George III upon enlistment, wore uniforms with the symbol of the crown, and imbibed patriotic songs as part of their service.Footnote 17 As Linda Colley, among other historians, has shown, military service strengthened the bonds of British patriotism, nationhood, and citizenship. Yet, at the same time, it could lead to a sense of ‘Europeanness’, with British soldiers expressing a shared martial, professional, or gentlemanly solidarity with continental counterparts, especially French soldiers.Footnote 18
Napoleon adds another dimension to these issues. As this article highlights, military service led soldiers to a more complex understanding of Napoleon beyond the ‘monster’ of wartime propaganda. Napoleon's harshest critics within the British army acknowledged that he possessed astonishing qualities nevertheless; and more surprisingly, there were those who found much to admire in Napoleon, to the point where this counterbalanced or even exceeded his faults and wrongdoings. In Spain, British soldiers found in Napoleon not only a warmonger and usurper, but also an antidote to Spanish backwardness and an ally against Roman Catholic power. British soldiers ended up fighting for the Restoration of the Bourbons in both Spain and France, and yet they were sometimes left questioning what exactly those nations were being liberated from, or indeed being delivered into. Moreover, Napoleon inspired divisions and tensions within the British army itself. In particular, common soldiers of a more dissident or radical disposition pointed out that there were lessons for Britain to be found in Napoleon's meritocratic system. And even Wellington himself was not spared from criticism, when British soldiers sung the virtues of the man he defeated at Waterloo.
I
Let us begin with soldiers’ letters and diaries written on the spot during the Napoleonic Wars. Officers overwhelmingly produced these writings, with relatively few private soldiers’ letters either written at the time or having survived, the letters of Private William Wheeler, who entered the army with little formal education, being a noted exception.Footnote 19 Officers’ letters were generally written to individual family members, although they could reach a wider audience both within families and local communities, and on occasion were also published in newspapers. Diaries and journals were of a more personal nature, although some were clearly kept for prosperity. Across these forms of contemporary writing are references and commentary on Napoleon. Some soldiers wrote very little or nothing on Napoleon, whilst others were more forthcoming. Within letters, the references to Napoleon tend to be brief and scattered; in diary entries, lengthier and more reflective. Both these types of sources convey the immediacy of eyewitness reportage from the war zones and campaign trail. Unlike post-war memoirs, they reveal more clearly what incidents and experiences provoked particular responses to Napoleon. Moreover, they allow us to identify and trace the degree to which soldiers’ attitudes to Napoleon evolved in light of shifting wartime experiences. On the one hand, they reveal the contemporary power of the Black Legend in shaping attitudes to Napoleon. Yet at the same time, they also reveal the very limitations of that propaganda. Fighting Napoleon's armies and living amongst both the Iberians and later the French exposed British soldiers to sides of Napoleon that unsettled and challenged the stock images of home-front anti-Napoleonic propaganda.
The Black Legend reached its height in Britain during the invasion scare of 1803–5.Footnote 20 It was in these years that British propaganda shifted from being anti-French to concentrating on one individual – Napoleon. In mobilizing hearts, minds, and bodies for the war effort, the British public was exposed to a great body of anti-Napoleonic pamphlets, sermons, cartoons, and songs. Napoleon was portrayed as the ‘monster’, the ‘Corsican Ogre’, and the devil himself. A strong theme, warning of the horrific fate that awaited the British people if Napoleon crossed the channel, were atrocity stories from Bonaparte's Egyptian expedition, namely Bonaparte's fateful dose of opium to plague-stricken French soldiers at Jaffa, and the mass execution of Turkish prisoners. Throughout the war years, British soldiers came into contact with the Black Legend, whether on the homefront or in British newspapers they read on campaign.
Many junior officers and common soldiers who later served in the Peninsular War were young boys or in their teens during the invasion scare of 1803–5. Moreover, they were later exposed to the extraordinary outbreak of enthusiasm in Britain for the ‘Spanish cause’ in the summer of 1808, with the struggle presented as Spanish liberty and patriotism against Napoleonic tyranny.Footnote 21
British soldiers certainly imbibed the Black Legend. Many of the themes and language of the Legend appear in officers’ wartime writings: Napoleon as usurper, criminal, tyrant, conqueror, militarist, warmonger, and monster. Such sentiment is found especially during the Peninsular War. Napoleon himself was only in Spain for a few months in late 1808, and British soldiers never faced him there in battle. But the Peninsula became the great centrepiece of Britain's armed continental struggle against Napoleon, where British soldiers fought the French for five long years and where they faced Napoleonic usurpation in its most dramatic form, with Napoleon having seized the Spanish crown and handing it to his brother, Joseph.
The degree to which some soldiers had internalized the Peninsula as part of a broader struggle over the liberty of Europe is evident from the outset. In June 1808, as he waited in the Cove of Cork to set sail with Wellesley's expeditionary army, Captain William Warre wrote to his father of his excitement of joining the Spanish ‘against the common enemy of Europe, the would-be tyrant of the world’.Footnote 22 Throughout his time in the Peninsula, Warre continued to refer to Napoleon as simply the ‘tyrant’ and Joseph Bonaparte the ‘usurper’, the latter reflecting that British soldiers in Spain were very conscious of fighting not only Napoleon but the Bonaparte family.Footnote 23
Above all, it was when faced with the horrors of the war in the Peninsula that British soldiers reproduced and reinforced elements of the Black Legend. British soldiers found themselves in the most violent and destructive theatre of the Napoleonic Wars, with some regions of the Peninsula experiencing something akin to ‘total war’.Footnote 24 Outraged at much of what they saw, British soldiers took on board that Napoleon was the sole source of the war and its attendant evils. Moreover, it was not simply the loss of British soldiers that provoked such responses, but all wartime death and suffering – whether British or French soldiers; Portuguese, Spanish, or French civilians. All were considered victims of Napoleon's unbridled ambition and militarism. Reflecting on the carnage of the battle of Salamanca as wounded French soldiers lay baking under a summer sun, Warre blamed this all on one man, writing to his father: ‘These are the horrid miseres of war…and we turn with disgust and detestation to the sole author of such miseries. What punishment can be sufficient for him.’Footnote 25 Travelling through central Portugal in 1813, the young hussar officer, Lieutenant George Woodberry, was shocked at the misery and suffering of the local inhabitants: ‘I pity the poor souls from the heart and feel the great abhorrence to the Monster, who has been so long the scourge of Nations.’Footnote 26 Amidst the scale of these horrors, the earlier Egyptian atrocity stories of the Black Legend paled in comparison, with soldiers rarely mentioning them.
Yet despite all this condemnation of Napoleon and his regime, amidst the crucible of the Peninsular War British soldiers also found qualities to admire in their adversary. In particular, Napoleon was perceived as a progressive lawmaker and destroyer of old regime Catholic power. Here was a conception of Napoleon as an agent of enlightened civilization and heir to the reformist dynamics of the French Revolution. This was central to the ambivalent and indeed conflicted ways in which British military men often responded to Napoleon: Napoleon as both limitless war maker and rational lawmaker. And it was in Iberia where British soldiers found these contrasts in sharpest relief.
Two inter-related processes were at work here. The first was British revulsion at the perceived backwardness of the Iberian Peninsula. As they journeyed through the Peninsula, many British officers described and categorized Spain and Portugal, drawing upon enlightened discourses on progress, improvement, and the comparative rankings of civilizations and peoples.Footnote 27 The Enlightenment deemed the Iberian Peninsula to be backward and isolated, with Spain languishing under the corruptive influence of the eighteenth-century Bourbons.Footnote 28 British officers wrote within this tradition, convinced that the contemporary Iberian Peninsula was in a state of decline and degeneracy, a world they characterized as feudal, impoverished, superstitious, primitive, and savage. Common soldiers, too, decried the primitivism of Iberia, never expressed more dramatically than by the English soldier, Private Wheeler, upon his arrival in Lisbon: ‘What an ignorant, superstitious, priest-ridden, dirty, lousy set of poor Devils are the Portuguese. Without seeing them it is impossible to conceive there exists a people in Europe so debased.’Footnote 29
The second process at work was that British soldiers came to admire their French enemy in the Peninsula; indeed their hostile and negative reaction to perceived Iberian primitivism and barbarism only made the French, by contrast, seem more attractive. Notwithstanding the violence and destruction of the French occupation forces, British soldiers came to self-identify with French soldiers as brave, honourable, civilized, and enlightened.Footnote 30 ‘The French’, wrote Lieutenant George Simmons in a letter home, ‘are a brave and generous enemy, and their humanity to the English prisoners is generosity to the extreme.’Footnote 31 This was a far cry from negative propaganda stereotypes of the French during the war, underscoring that Francophobia was ever only one facet of eighteenth-century British attitudes to France.Footnote 32
Here lay a fundamental paradox and source of tension: for the very occupation forces that the British were seeking to expel were also seen as part of the Peninsula's possible salvation. This tension is evident in the journal of the Welsh hussar officer, Edwin Griffith.Footnote 33 Raised on the family estate of Rhual near Mold in Flintshire, Griffith arrived in the Peninsula in 1808 as a captain in the 15th Hussars during Moore's campaign; he returned to serve in the Peninsula and southern France in 1813–14; and later fought at Waterloo where he died leading a cavalry charge. Griffith was certainly no great admirer of Napoleon. After riding across the battlefield of Sorauren in northern Spain in July 1813, Griffith was deeply distressed at the carnage and suffering. He blamed one man, writing in his journal that he hoped the ‘tyrant’ Napoleon would be cast in to hell ‘where the tears, the groans, the miseries, the want, torture, and despair, that you have caused, and beheld with indifference here, may there be accumulated & settled eternally upon they detested head’.Footnote 34 Yet, over the course of the war, Griffith had been shocked at the state of Spain. When he first arrived in the Peninsula in November 1808, disembarking in Corunna, Griffith thought he had stumbled into a world time had forgotten: ‘At present I can only say that it appears some century's behind England in everything.’Footnote 35 His opinion of Spanish backwardness did not change over the course of the war; but his opinion of the French presence in Spain did. Napoleon had brought death and destruction to the Peninsula, but Griffith also acknowledged another side to the French occupation. Three weeks before the battle of Sorauren, he confided as such in his journal: ‘My private opinion however is that the French having possession of the country for a few years would make it one of the finest upon earth. They would establish a wise government, enforce salutary laws, suppress convents & Inquisition, and relieve a people, by nature high minded & enlightened, from the miserable effects of religious despotism.’Footnote 36
Griffith was far from alone in this sentiment. British soldiers serving in the Peninsula were especially drawn to Napoleon on matters of religion. Stuart Semmel has highlighted the challenge for the British of defining Napoleon in religious terms, especially within the traditional framework of France as the Catholic ‘Other’.Footnote 37 This conventional British conception of French religious identity had been dramatically challenged by the Terror and dechristianization of the Jacobin Republic, with the long-standing Anglo-French Protestant/Catholic divide giving way to a new Christian/Atheistic divide.Footnote 38 But Napoleon did not fit neatly into either of these binary configurations. In his expedition to Egypt, Napoleon had famously presented himself as a friend of Islam. Then, under the Concordat of 1801, Napoleon restored the Catholic Church to France, but one under the firm control of the state and operating within the religious reforms of the French Revolution: Catholicism returned not as the official state religion, but as the religion of the ‘majority’, with freedom of religion, and Protestants and Jews enjoying citizenship rights; the religious orders remained suppressed; and the property rights of those who had earlier purchased nationalized church lands were guaranteed. Napoleon's religious reforms were then exported throughout the empire, most violently and divisively to Spain.
Whilst there was a diverse range of opinion in Britain about Napoleon's religious policies, including Loyalists portraying Napoleon in league with the papacy, British soldiers in the Iberian Peninsula were in agreement: Napoleon was the scourge of Iberian Catholicism – and this could only be admired. Such was the level of hostility felt by Britain's largely Protestant army towards Catholicism in Spain and Portugal.Footnote 39 From the moment they arrived in the Peninsula, British soldiers were shocked and outraged by the wealth and power of the church and monasteries, and the hold of the priesthood over a population considered ignorant and superstitious. Indeed, British soldiers saw the Catholic Church as the single greatest obstacle to long-term national improvement, prosperity, and enlightenment. Thus, notwithstanding the violence of French anti-clericalism and occupation policies in the Iberian Peninsula, British soldiers came to applaud Napoleon's suppression of the Inquisition and monastic orders, some even arguing that this made up for all the wartime suffering. Such was the opinion of Private Wheeler: ‘Thanks to Napoleon for abolishing it [the Inquisition]; he has done Spain much harm, but this one mighty act has in great measure, counterbalanced all the mischief he has done.’Footnote 40 The military surgeon Charles Boutflower went even further in his private journal. Writing from the Peninsula in 1810, he weighed up Napoleon's ‘unworthiness’ with his ‘antipathy to convents and monks’ and his policy of allowing ‘men to think for themselves in matters of Religion’. Boutflower concluded: ‘It is under this view of it that I think it even desirable that the French should eventually succeed in subjugating Spain and Portugal.’Footnote 41
II
If soldiers developed mixed feelings about Napoleon during their time in the Iberian Peninsula, the same was no less true of their time in France in 1814 and 1815 and of their responses to the extraordinary events of these years. When Wellington's victorious army finally crossed the Pyrenees and pushed into southern France in late 1813 and early 1814, British soldiers came into contact with Napoleon's France for the very first time. In their letters and diaries, a liberation narrative prevails: soldiers describe being welcomed as heroes by the local inhabitants, of crowds cheering for Wellington and waving white flags in support of the Bourbons, and jubilation at Napoleon's downfall. It was in Toulouse, on 12 April, that the British army received news of Napoleon's abdication after the entry of the allied armies into Paris. ‘The delight of the people at their emancipation from tyranny is really inconceivable’, wrote Captain Arthur Kennedy, ‘men, women and children all shed tears with joy’.Footnote 42 This reinforced in most British soldiers’ minds that they had helped liberate the French people from a detested tyrant and warmonger.
Yet in early 1814, there were already some within the British army who were not entirely taken in by this emancipation from tyranny narrative. Wellington's judge advocate, Francis Larpent, wrote from St Jean de Luz:
He [Napoleon] has done much good for them [the French people], and on a grand scale. The Code Napoleon has been a great work, and from what I hear is much liked. Instead of being governed, and oppressed in fact, by the rich, as they were before, they are now governed by the law, and that a good law.Footnote 43
Larpent identified the devastating social and economic impact of war – horrendous conscription levies precipitated by the Russian disaster, and the ruin of French Atlantic commerce in the south-west – as the source of Napoleon's unpopularity in the region.Footnote 44 Above all, it was peace that the locals desired. After a conversation with a landowner at Viella in the Hautes-Pyrénées, Larpent concluded the man would rather ‘have Bonaparte and peace than the Bourbons’.Footnote 45
Those British soldiers who travelled into northern France in 1814 arrived at a similar conclusion. Whilst infantry regiments sailed for home through south-west French ports, cavalry regiments travelled north to depart through the channel ports. These soldiers were exposed to differing regional attitudes to Napoleon, discovering that what was true of the south-west did not necessarily hold for the north.Footnote 46 Near Boulogne in July 1814, the military surgeon Samuel Broughton reflected on the journey northwards: ‘With some exceptions, the inhabitants of the southern provinces appear to be more generally in favour of the Restoration of the Bourbons than those bordering upon the Metropolis.’Footnote 47 Writing to his sister from Paris in July 1814, Edwin Griffith declared: ‘I cannot help fearing that a great proportion of the people would be glad to see that arch villain Boney back again.’Footnote 48
They did not have long to wait. Reading British soldiers’ reactions to the news of Napoleon's return from Elba reveal their utter astonishment at the man. Whatever their political opinion of Napoleon and his regime, they nevertheless saw in him a romantic transcendental figure who bestrode the age: inhuman or superhuman, a force for evil or for some good, he was nevertheless not of this world. ‘This scoundrel Bonaparte to the astonishment of the world’, wrote Lieutenant James Gairdner in April 1815, ‘has it were by magic reseated himself without spilling a drop of blood.’Footnote 49 Here was Napoleon as no mere mortal, seemingly possessed of a power and magnetism that defied human reason. Captain George Bowles of the Coldstream Guards despised so many things about Napoleon, yet writing from Brussels on 18 March 1815, he could not help concede Napoleon's singular nature and the spell he cast over Europe: ‘He is so extraordinary a character, and infatuates mankind so completely, that one is almost afraid of arguing for common principles; otherwise, this really does appear the most desperate and ill-timed attempt imaginable.’Footnote 50
Of course, Napoleon's great gamble failed on the field of Waterloo. His return brought the return of war, reinforcing in British soldiers’ minds that Napoleon was incompatible with peace. For Sergeant William Tennant of the Guards, the answer to ending Europe's woes was a simple one. Writing to his wife from Paris in the aftermath of Waterloo, he expressed concern that ‘Mr Boney’ was still at large, convinced that ‘we shall never have a lasting peace until he is put to death’.Footnote 51
Yet the victorious post-Waterloo British army that triumphantly entered northern France in 1815 still found a French public struggling to let go of Napoleon and one divided over the return of the Bourbons. In reading the public mood, British soldiers voiced doubts over the sincerity and level of attachment to the Bourbons. Indeed, like their counterparts of 1814, they sensed a far deeper French devotion to Napoleon than to Louis XVIII, certainly in Paris and among other northern cities and towns. Billeted with a French family in July 1815, Captain William Tomkinson thought the only reason they had bothered to see Louis XVIII's entry into Paris on 8 July was the spectacle itself. For the lady of the household had ‘no particular dislike to Napoleon’ and had indeed proclaimed that if not for the disastrous Russian campaign, ‘they could have given laws to all the world’.Footnote 52 Here, again, British soldiers found Napoleon the lawmaker.
A number of soldiers also acknowledged that the Bourbon Restoration and Napoleon's return had reawakened Jacobinism and the revolutionary spirit in France.Footnote 53 For some, this was a cause of great anxiety. The conservative Guards officer George Bowles, who feared the rise of popular radicalism in Britain after the war, was concerned that unless Louis XVIII took a firmer stance, ‘The moment we leave the country something will take place in the shape of a revolution.’Footnote 54 Others, however, were more sympathetic, critical of the reactionary émigré forces gravitating around Louis XVIIII and the threat this posed to the revolutionary settlement. Writing near Paris in July 1815, Lieutenant Frederick Johnston could understand the fear that the Bourbons engendered amongst the French: ‘The minds of men are more enlightened than they were 25 years ago and the people dread the bigotry and superstition of an overbearing priesthood supported by the king, and the tyranny of feudal rights.’Footnote 55 Here was an implicit acknowledgement of Napoleon as protector of revolutionary gains, a bulwark against the forces of counter-revolution.
Looking on at the Second Restoration, William Wheeler, now a veteran of both the Peninsula and Waterloo, could find no kind words for Louis XVIII, describing him as an ‘old bloated poltroon, the Sir John Falstaff of France’, in contrast with ‘Napoleon the Great’.Footnote 56 Others, too, within the British army labelled Napoleon ‘great’. Flushed with the victory of Waterloo, William Tomkinson wrote of marching off to Paris to ‘dethrone the great Napoleon’.Footnote 57 Edwin Griffith, too, in his earlier tirade against Napoleon after the battle of Sorauren, had written – ‘What millions die that Caesar may be great’ – borrowing this line from Thomas Campbell's famous 1799 poem, ‘The pleasures of hope’.Footnote 58 In characterizing Napoleon as a ‘great man’ of history, British soldiers alluded to his dramatic rise and fame, his force of will and personal power, and above all his success as a general, conqueror, and empire builder. In these ‘great man’ stakes, Louis XVIII did not stand a chance.
For Wheeler, like other British soldiers, much of Napoleon's greatness was on display in Paris. Paris inspired a sense of awe, wonder, and fascination amongst the many British soldiers who visited in 1814 and 1815. Here, British soldiers’ practices foreshadowed the extraordinary interest in Napoleonic tourism and collectibles that would sweep Britain and continental Europe in the post-Waterloo era.Footnote 59 Hordes of British tourists, Walter Scott and Lord Byron amongst them, flocked to Waterloo and Paris. The most sought-after places and objects were anything connected with Napoleon, which all resonated with his celebrity, historical importance, and dramatic downfall. The Paris that British soldiers toured and admired in 1814–15 was above all ‘Napoleon's Paris’, with soldiers noting the letter ‘N’ – a ‘magical letter’ according to Samuel BroughtonFootnote 60 – inscribed on many buildings. They readily acknowledged the city was a central site of Napoleonic propaganda, but they could not help but be moved by its grandeur. ‘In the pursuit of his ambitious projects’, Broughton wrote in 1814, ‘Paris has undoubtedly gained much advantage…Monuments and bridges illustrative of his victories and fame are perpetually to be met with; streets are widened, public buildings repaired and newly adorned.’Footnote 61 British soldiers flocked to see the imperial coronation paraphernalia at Notre Dame, the stolen art treasures of the Louvre, Invalides, the column at Place de Vendome, the horses of St Marks, and the Tuileries.
But time was of the essence for connoisseurs of Napoleon in 1815. There was now an urgency, spurred on by the knowledge that Napoleon's plundered art treasures from Italy and elsewhere would soon be restored to their respective owners. William Wheeler was still stationed near Paris in November 1815 after the allies had removed the spoils of Napoleon's martial victories and empire. Wheeler felt and lamented this absence: ‘Paris begins to feel the ill effects of this second visit of the allies. The golden horses are gone…The bare wall in the once beautiful picture gallery looks frightful, the monument at the Place de Vendom has been stripped of its brass ornaments.’Footnote 62 There was no over-riding sense here for Wheeler of the righting of wrongs, only an expression of nostalgia for the passing of Napoleon's imperial capital with its military glories and trophies – symbolic of the closing of an age itself. This sense of nostalgia would only grow amongst British soldiers in the post-war years.
III
In Britain, in the decades following Waterloo, there was an extraordinary outpouring of soldiers’ memoirs on the Napoleonic Wars.Footnote 63 Officers, including many of junior rank, were primarily responsible for this wave of publications, but a significant number of common soldiers, for the first time in British history, also gave voice to their experiences. And it was not simply the case that more soldiers than ever before were writing, but they were finding willing publishers and a receptive public, with a seemingly insatiable appetite for the adventures and victories of Wellington's men in the Peninsula and at Waterloo. Soldiers’ memoirs became an important part of the public and national memory of the Napoleonic Wars. The great heyday of military memoirs was in the 1820s and 1830s, but veterans’ accounts continued to be published well into the 1850s and 1860s.
One such late account was by Captain Rees Howell Gronow.Footnote 64 Eton educated, Guards officer during the final phases of the Peninsular War and at Waterloo, dandy, Francophile, and long-term resident of France after the war – Gronow had a great admiration for the Bonapartes, even introduced to Napoleon's mother and Hortense de Beauharnais when they were living in exile in Rome in the 1820s.Footnote 65 Gronow was elected as a Whig MP for Stafford in 1832 but after losing the seat in 1835 came to spend more and more time in Paris, which he made his home. Fittingly, he was living in France when Louis-Napoleon seized power in December 1851, and there he died, in Paris on 20 November 1865, a committed Bonapartist. As he wrote in his Reminiscences (4 volumes, 1861–6): ‘Intelligent Englishmen have lived long enough to appreciate the genius of Napoleon I, whose mode of governing France has been applied by Napoleon III, with a success which prejudice even has been compelled to acknowledge.’Footnote 66 Very few British soldiers, during or after the war, shared such unabashed political admiration for the Bonapartes as Gronow. Yet his reminiscences nevertheless capture the more sympathetic tone of soldiers’ memoirs towards Napoleon relative to earlier wartime letters and diaries.
In large part, this was symptomatic of British soldiers composing their memoirs amidst the burgeoning romantic cult of Napoleon over the post-war decades. The Hundred Days and Waterloo had only added to the Legend; so too Napoleon's exile on St Helena, which gave rise to the suffering and tragic hero, so dear to romantic hearts. Britain, as Napoleon's ‘gaoler’, played a central role here.Footnote 67 Indeed, British military men were key actors in this drama: Napoleonic sympathizers, such as Lord and Lady Holland, cast Hudson Lowe, the governor on St Helena, as the villain; and the Irish naval surgeon, Barry O'Meara, as the hero, for exposing Lowe's ill treatment of Napoleon. Napoleon's banishment and then death also meant that he was no longer a living enemy to be feared by the British, Sir Walter Scott proclaiming in his 1827 history of Napoleon that ‘He will be found no enemy to the person of Napoleon. The term of hostility is ended when the battle has been won, and the foe no longer exists.’Footnote 68 A Tory, Scott nevertheless sung the virtues of Napoleon as a military leader and administrative reformer, whilst damning his selfish ambition and hubris. Later, Thomas Carlyle, in his famous 1840 lectures on heroes and the great man in history, simply declared Napoleon ‘our last Great Man!’.Footnote 69
Yet perhaps the single greatest influence – at least in terms of texts – on how British soldier memoirists approached Napoleon from the late 1820s onwards was Sir William Napier's landmark six-volume History of the war in the Peninsula and in the south of France (1828–40). Napier had served as a senior officer in the Light Division during the war. His work became the standard history of the conflict, but was controversial all the same, not least because of its admiration of Napoleon, Napier being a Whig, a post-war friend of Marshal Soult, and long-time admirer of the French emperor from the time of the war itself.Footnote 70 ‘To France’, wrote Napier, ‘he gave noble institutions, a comparatively just code of laws, and glory unmatched since the days of the Romans.’Footnote 71 Napier was widely read within military circles, and his history was often quoted or plagiarized by soldier memoirists.
Just as the case with letters and diaries, the degree to which British military memoirists wrote about Napoleon varied across authors. But the passage and safety of time invited longer reflections and appraisals. Some memoirists framed their accounts around Napoleon's rise, return, and final fall, blending their own personal experiences into the broader military and political history of the era, reminding their readers that they too had shared the same stage as Napoleon. In his famous journal of the Waterloo campaign (largely a memoir as it was composed around 1830 from rough wartime notes), Captain Cavalié Mercer began with Napoleon in the very first sentence, setting out the background context to Waterloo with Napoleon's return from Elba.Footnote 72 In the opening paragraph of his 1858 recollections, the Waterloo veteran, Sergeant Thomas Morris, went one better, placing his own arrival in the world next to Napoleon himself, the two sharing the same birthday: ‘The day was memorable as being the anniversary of the birth of the Great Napoleon the first.’Footnote 73 Morris joined the army as a seventeen-year-old from Middlesex in 1813.
Morris was amongst those memoirists who integrated contemporary documents, and quotes from writers and historians, into their accounts. This served to legitimize and authenticate the memoir as ‘history’ and to provide supporting evidence for evaluations of Napoleon. In his 1845 Recollections of military service, Morris includes a long history of Napoleon's return during the Hundred Days, beginning with Napoleon's proclamation upon arriving in France. Morris offers a very sympathetic portrait of the ‘great Napoleon’, even defending his return from Elba on the grounds that the allies had failed to honour their agreement over his exile.Footnote 74 In delivering a final summation of Napoleon's place in history, Morris reproduced the entire 1816 essay on Napoleon's character by the Irish barrister and orator, Charles Phillips, who portrayed Napoleon as a flawed romantic genius: ‘That he has done much evil there is little doubt; that he has been the origin of much good there is just as little.’Footnote 75
Another soldier who admired Napoleon, and in this case quoted Napier to bolster the case, was Charles O'Neil, a rare example of an Irish Catholic ranker memoirist. O'Neil emigrated to North America in 1830 and his memoir was published in Boston in 1851. He had certainly imbibed his Napier, plagiarizing and quoting extracts throughout his memoir, including Napoleon's proclamation to the inhabitants of Madrid, which set out the broad reforms of the Chamartin decrees of 1808.Footnote 76 What Catholic soldiers in the British army thought of Napoleon's attack on the Spanish church is difficult to gauge, given the dearth of such accounts. But O'Neil certainly endorsed Napoleon's reform of feudalism and the church in Spain, lamenting ‘could the people but have yielded their prejudices, and submitted to his wise plans, what seas of tears and blood, what degradation and confusion, might have been spared to poor, unhappy Spain’.Footnote 77 Other veterans of the Peninsular War also publicly endorsed Napoleon's religious policies in Spain. Captain Moyle Sherer, for example, in his famous Recollections of the Peninsula (1823) conceded that Napoleon had at least brought ‘one blessing’ to Spain, delivering to the church and priesthood ‘a blow, from the effects of which it can never perfectly recover’.Footnote 78
Neil Ramsey has highlighted the romantic and sentimental qualities of British military memoirs of the Napoleonic Wars, reflecting the growing influence of Romantic culture over the nineteenth century. In keeping, memoirists generally adopted a more romantic mode towards Napoleon than wartime writers, notwithstanding earlier romantic appreciations. The ‘great man’ of wartime diaries and letters was still present, even more so, but now existed alongside the romantic ‘genius’. Cavalié Mercer condemned Napoleon as the source of Europe's wartime suffering, but proclaimed him a ‘genius’ all the same, and described first setting eyes on him at Quatre Bras in classic romantic mode, set against a backdrop of brooding thunderclouds and sunlight hills: ‘I had often longed to see Napoleon, that mighty man of war – that astonishing genius who had filled the world with his renown. Now I saw him, and there was a degree of sublimity in the interview rarely equalled.’Footnote 79 For memoirists, Napoleon's ‘genius’ above all lay in his military prowess. During the war, British soldiers did not hold forth at any length about Napoleon's greatness as a general; the threat that he and his armies posed was all too real and immediate to be a subject for lengthy praise or reflection whilst on campaign. But in the post-war years, soldier memoirists highlighted how singular and great an adversary they had faced; of course, such praise magnified their own martial achievements in prevailing over such a foe. In his 1835 memoir, Lieutenant John Cooke indulged in the cult of ‘military romanticism’Footnote 80 that developed around Napoleon, drawing out the picturesque appeal of Napoleon and the Grand Army – the countless victories throughout foreign lands; the dazzling uniforms and imperial martial culture; and disaster in the snows of Russia.Footnote 81 Other memoirists lauded Napoleon as the great ‘master-spirit’ behind the victories and fame of the French armies.Footnote 82
Wellington suffered in comparison. Wellington's post-Waterloo fame in Britain was extraordinary, a national hero lauded in poems and histories, with monuments and buildings bearing his name.Footnote 83 To his admirers, Wellington epitomized the British virtues of duty, modesty, patience, courage, and gentlemanly honour. And yet for all this, the hero of Waterloo and the Peninsula never excited the imagination of the British public or indeed his own soldiers in the way that Napoleon did.Footnote 84 In the Waterloo stakes, it was Napoleon's defeat and final exile rather than Wellington's victory that ultimately resonated most strongly with Romantic sensibilities drawn to tragic downfall. And for Whigs and Radicals, Wellington's reputation suffered in light of his political career and prime ministership, most notably his opposition to the 1832 Reform Act. To his detractors, Wellington was characterized as stiff and stern, an aloof Tory aristocrat resistant to both political and army reform.
Napoleon and Wellington naturally lent themselves to comparisons. British soldiers certainly acknowledged Wellington as a great commander, but there is a sense that he still ran second to Napoleon. Cooke hailed Wellington as ‘foremost among the heroic names of that epoch’, but nevertheless it was Napoleon who was the ‘genius’ and at the ‘grand centre of every thing military in Europe’.Footnote 85 Unlike Wellington, it was Napoleon who stood outside the epoch, comparable only to the ancients. Reflecting on the failings of British command during the New Orleans campaign of 1814, it was not Wellington that Cooke turned to but rather Napoleon and Caesar: ‘did he [Napoleon] halt when the enemy were in view, or when winning a victory did he cease to follow it up?’Footnote 86 Some soldiers even openly declared Napoleon the superior military commander. ‘Many English writers in speaking of Wellington’, mused Charles O'Neil, ‘have drawn a parallel between him and Napoleon, because he was commander-in-chief when the battle of Waterloo was won.’ But O'Neil would have nothing of the sort, declaring that Wellington and indeed Soult were well matched, but ‘who would think even for a moment, of instituting a comparison of equality before Napoleon and Soult?’Footnote 87 O'Neil even trumpeted out one of the many post-Waterloo conspiracies, that Grouchy was bought off with English gold, concluding: ‘Napoleon would have gained the victory at Waterloo, had not treachery and bribery done their work.’Footnote 88
Where British soldiers especially noted a difference between Napoleon and Wellington was in their respective holds over the affections of their troops. In this stake, there was simply no contest: Napoleon was seen as beloved by his troops; Wellington only admired.Footnote 89 Cooke claimed that ‘Wellington was not what may be called popular’ within the army.Footnote 90 In contrast, and reflecting the culture of sensibility and sentimentalism that infused many memoirs, British soldiers marvelled at the devotion and emotional ties that Napoleon engendered amongst his men. Ensign George Bell recounts a story of a British medical officer expressing concern to a wounded French soldier that he was causing great pain in extracting a musket ball, to which the veteran replied: ‘“Ah”, he said in deep emotion, “cut deeper, sir, and you will find the Emperor; he's buried in my heart.”’Footnote 91 Part of this devotion, and part of Napoleon's military genius, British soldiers pointed out, lay in the ‘soul-stirring harangues which he himself pronounced to his troops’.Footnote 92 Again, Wellington came out all the poorer by comparison, something remarked upon during the war years themselves. After Waterloo, for example, Lieutenant Standish O'Grady thought Napoleon was more generous in his praise of the conduct of the British army than Wellington himself in his famous dispatch, complaining to his father: ‘the whole army cry out against Ld Wellington's dispatch; it is the coldest and most flat production that ever his Lordship has produced. Bonaparte does the British army more justice and if we except two or three lines his dispatch is a remarkably fair one.’Footnote 93 In this regard, sentimental soldiers could only sigh for Napoleon and despair at Wellington.
IV
There was something else, too, that drew British soldiers to Napoleon, but this set rankers and officers apart. Across letters and memoirs, British officers and rankers had much in common in how they wrote about Napoleon. Yet there was one striking difference: British common soldiers greatly admired Napoleon for rewarding talent, and they saw this as a key source of why he attracted such devotion from his men. Napoleon himself was seen as the most spectacular embodiment of careers open to talent. Yet this struck a particular chord amongst British rankers and non-commissioned officers, who celebrated Napoleon's army as a meritocratic institution, honouring and promoting talent regardless of military rank or social status – the proverbial ‘marshal's baton’ in every soldier's knapsack.
Such soldiers’ writings carry a sense of British radical political culture and nineteenth-century class identity. Well might David Wilkie's famous 1822 painting, Chelsea pensioners reading the Waterloo dispatch, have presented a unified ‘Military Britain’, but it masked internal divisions and tensions: between officers and rankers, and between Waterloo and Peninsular men. William Wheeler, for example, took aim at military dispatches that singled out the deaths or wounds suffered by senior officers, asking ‘who shall record the glorious deeds of the soldier whose lot is numbered with the thousands in the ranks who live and die and fight in obscurity’.Footnote 94 This sentiment was only amplified after the war, with Neil Ramsey identifying a distinct ‘dissident tradition’ of labouring-class soldier memoirs appearing from the 1820s, which sought to highlight the wartime suffering, hardship, and sacrifice endured by the common soldier.Footnote 95 In this sense, as Nick Mansfield has argued, soldiers could be radicalized by virtue of their military service.Footnote 96 In the post-war decades, this was in part a reaction to the challenges of demobilization and reintegration that veterans faced after 1815; to post-Waterloo commemorative practices that heroized officers and rarely singled out the common soldier;Footnote 97 to the failure to grant a Military General Service Medal to Peninsular veterans until 1847 (Waterloo veterans enjoying their own 1815 struck medal); and to slow and limited army reform – Wellington did not budge on flogging or the purchase system, and opposed a Peninsular medal.Footnote 98
The memoir of Thomas Morris sits firmly within this dissident tradition. Morris professed to having ‘served my country, faithfully and efficiently’.Footnote 99 Nevertheless, he highlighted the cruelties of military flogging, and made it clear that his account was a corrective to past histories where the ‘greatest praise has invariably been given to those regiments whose officers were of high birth and aristocratic connexions’.Footnote 100 And it was precisely his own lack of birth and social standing that Morris blamed for thwarting his military career: ‘I was foolish enough to imagine that by good steady conduct, or by some daring act of bravery, I should be fortunate enough to gain a commission.’Footnote 101
Yet what has passed unnoticed by historians to date is that such soldiers could turn to Napoleon, in whom they found a figure with which to criticize their own military institution and the British establishment more generally. This adds another layer to the history of radical responses to Napoleon. Oskar Cox Jensen has identified the sympathetic and heroic portrayal of Napoleon in British popular song after 1815: the exiled Napoleon, as a perceived victim of injustice at the hands of the British state, resonated with popular protest culture amidst the economic depression and demobilization that followed Waterloo.Footnote 102 Moreover, Stuart Semmel has stressed the ways in which British radical writers found ‘uses’ for Napoleon, deploying him ‘as a cudgel with which to chastise their own rulers’.Footnote 103 William Cobbett was one such radical, the fierce advocate for army and parliamentary reform, an ex-soldier and NCO himself before the Revolutionary Wars.Footnote 104 In their own way, too, common British soldiers of the Napoleonic Wars took up Napoleon as a stick to beat Britain. For Morris, Napoleon championed the military career aspirations of the common man, ‘throwing open to the meanest soldier, the road of promotion to the highest honours’. Yet, raged Morris, ‘how different the practice in the British army!’Footnote 105 The Irish ranker Edward Costello, the son of a Dublin tidewaiter, was of the same opinion. In his 1841 memoir, Costello complained that his reward for being a ‘stormer’ at Badajoz was all of six dollars. Yet how different was the French army, where such soldiers were ‘always first in the list for commissions, and were distinguished also by a cross of the Legion of Honour…How must the heart of those thus distinguished beat at the possession of such a mark.’ For Costello, the fate of the British veteran of the Peninsular War was to remain forgotten and undistinguished, ‘save that which points him out with his empty sleeves or wooden stump limping to Chelsea’.Footnote 106 In contrast, the Napoleonic regime was applauded for rewarding and caring for its veterans. In Paris after Waterloo, Wheeler visited Invalides and struck up a conversation with one of its in-pensioners, a wounded French soldier who had recently been awarded the Legion of Honour upon Napoleon's return from exile. ‘I do not wonder’, wrote Wheeler, ‘that the soldier of France was so attached to the Emperor, when the same honours are alike open to all ranks, as Corporal Trim said “from the General to the lowest drum boy”.’Footnote 107
V
In the end, across soldiers’ writings as a whole we find a range of responses to Napoleon, with most soldiers sitting somewhere on a continuum between unequivocal condemnation and veneration. Most soldiers held mixed views, finding cause to both condemn and positively identify with their very enemy: whether Napoleon, his army, or his regime. Given the intense anti-Napoleonic propaganda of the war years, the scale of British military mobilization, the horrors of the Peninsular War, and how the Napoleonic Wars hung so tightly in the balance, what is most surprising here is the degree to which British soldiers still admired Napoleon. Napoleon was denounced as a ‘monster’, an enemy of Britain and Europe, and of liberty and peace. British soldiers were both jubilant and immensely relieved at his defeat. And yet the Black Legend's claim over the minds of British soldiers during their time in Portugal, Spain, and France was anything but complete and absolute. As soldiers themselves, they were naturally drawn to Napoleon as a military commander, but they were also taken by his wider religious, legal, and social reforms – the core of which survived the collapse of the empire and the Restoration of the Bourbons. Away from Napoleon as romantic hero and the greatest captain of the age, what resonated most positively with soldiers was Napoleon as religious reformer and hammer to Iberian Catholicism.
British soldiers reconciled all this with their own patriotic service in the British army. They were able to accommodate not only an admiration for Napoleon, but one that sometimes carried with it criticism of the regimes they helped to restore, and even of Wellington and the British army itself. Soldiers’ own national backgrounds within the army seem to have had no bearing on attitudes to Napoleon. But some internal distinctions are apparent, with Napoleon a source of division within the army. Whatever their political disposition, all soldiers expressed some degree of fascination and admiration for Napoleon; but in the rare cases where it is possible to discern political leanings along domestic party lines, Whiggish and radical-minded soldiers and veterans were more sympathetic to Napoleon than conservatives. More apparent are class differences. In celebrating Napoleon as a custodian of revolutionary meritocracy, British rank and file found in him a foil in which to criticize their own army as an institution and the perceived failings of British state and society to recognize and reward their heroism and sacrifice. Patriotic and proud redcoats, they were nevertheless far from uncritical servants of the nation, pointing to Napoleon and the French example as a model for improving the lot of the British common soldier and veteran.
Whilst most soldiers formed mixed views on Napoleon, the passage of time altered the balance of this mix, with old veterans more favourably disposed to Napoleon than their earlier wartime counterparts. Across the lifecycle of soldiering – from enlistment and wartime service, to peace and retirement – attitudes to Napoleon evolved: the weight of sentiment broadly shifting from condemnation to ambivalence to admiration, with shades in between. Over the post-war decades, nostalgia and the full blooming of the Napoleonic Legend only amplified more romantic and positive appraisals of Napoleon in soldiers’ memoirs. The ‘monster’ had all but vanished.
Brigadier George Bingham, who had fought in the Peninsular War, came to command the garrison at St Helena and established a growing relationship over the years with Napoleon. Bingham was there at Napoleon's death in May 1821 and wrote the following: ‘He was, general and unanimous exclamation declared, the finest corpse ever seen; there was something so noble, so dignified in his countenance, that a heart of stone, his most bitter enemy, could not have beheld without interest and admiration.’Footnote 108 The greatest carriers of the Napoleonic Legend across the nineteenth century were Napoleon's own veterans. But British soldiers, in their own conflicted way, played their part too.
