Everyone knows about the Battle of Waterloo or do they? This book presents the battle as never before: through the personal stories of over 150 people present at the battle or its immediate aftermath. A reference book, a biographical dictionary, and a myth-busting expose, Who was Who at Waterloo is an indispensable guide to historys most famous battle. Arranged in alphabetical order, and with entries highlighted throughout the text like links in a website, the book boasts a colourful cast of soldiers, politicians, peasants, surgeons, artists, novelists, poets, scientists, entrepreneurs, and more. It provides many sorties into nineteenth century culture, politics, medicine and science. It also provides a thorough look at the sources, identifying myths, irregularities and cover-ups. The book demonstrates how little we can really know about Waterloo. And yet it also demonstrates just how much can be said about the battles participants.
Marking the 200th anniversary of his death, Napoleon is an unprecedented portrait of the emperor told through his engagement with the natural world. “How should one envisage this subject? With a great pomp of words, or with simplicity?” —Charlotte Brontë, “The Death of Napoleon” The most celebrated general in history, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) has for centuries attracted eminent male writers. Since Thomas Carlyle first christened him “our last Great Man,” regiments of biographers have marched across the same territory, weighing campaigns and conflicts, military tactics and power politics. Yet in all this time, no definitive portrait of Napoleon has endured, and a mere handful of women have written his biography—a fact that surely would have pleased him. With Napoleon, Ruth Scurr, one of our most eloquent and original historians, emphatically rejects the shibboleth of the “Great Man” theory of history, instead following the dramatic trajectory of Napoleon’s life through gardens, parks, and forests. As Scurr reveals, gardening was the first and last love of Napoleon, offering him a retreat from the manifold frustrations of war and politics. Gardens were, at the same time, a mirror image to the battlefields on which he fought, discrete settings in which terrain and weather were as important as they were in combat, but for creative rather than destructive purposes. Drawing on a wealth of contemporary and historical scholarship, and taking us from his early days at the military school in Brienne-le-Château through his canny seizure of power and eventual exile, Napoleon frames the general’s story through the green spaces he cultivated. Amid Corsican olive groves, ornate menageries in Paris, and lone garden plots on the island of Saint Helena, Scurr introduces a diverse cast of scientists, architects, family members, and gardeners, all of whom stood in the shadows of Napoleon’s meteoric rise and fall. Building a cumulative panorama, she offers indelible portraits of Augustin Bon Joseph de Robespierre, the younger brother of Maximilien Robespierre, who used his position to advance Napoleon’s career; Marianne Peusol, the fourteen-year-old girl manipulated into a Christmas-Eve assassination attempt on Napoleon that resulted in her death; and Emmanuel, comte de Las Cases, the atlas maker to whom Napoleon dictated his memoirs. As Scurr contends, Napoleon’s dealings with these people offer unusual and unguarded opportunities to see how he grafted a new empire onto the remnants of the ancien régime and the French Revolution. Epic in scale and novelistic in its detail, Napoleon, with stunning illustrations, is a work of revelatory range and depth, revealing the contours of the general’s personality and power as no conventional biography can.
The Scum of the Earth explores the common soldiers the Duke of Wellington angrily condemned as 'scum' for their looting at Vitoria, from their great victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 to their return home to a Regency Britain at war with itself. It follows men like James Graham, the Irishman hailed as the bravest man in the British Army for his heroic action in closing the north gate at Hougoumont, and fresh documentary evidence that he was forced to plead for charity because he was so poor; Francis Styles, who went to his grave claiming that he had captured the eagle that was credited to his superior officer; and John Lees, a spinner from Oldham who joined up at 15, braved shell and shot to deliver ammunition to the guns at Waterloo and was cut down four years later at the Peterloo Massacre by some of the cavalry with whom he served. All this is set against a backdrop of civil unrest on a scale unprecedented in British history. The Regency age is famous for its elegance, its exuberance, the industrial revolution that made Britain the powerhouse of Europe and the naval might that made it a global superpower. But it was also an age of riots and the fear that the mob would win control just as it had done in Paris. Britain came closer to bloody revolution than ever before or since, as ordinary men – including some of the men whom Wellington called the scum of the earth – took to the streets to fight for their voices to be heard in Parliament. The riots were put down by a series of repressive measures while Wellington stood like a bastion against the tide of history. He was defeated with the passage of the Great Reform Act in 1832. There is no one better placed to take a cold, hard look at the battle and its aftermath in order to save us from a bicentenary of misty-eyed backslapping than a former political editor with a reputation for myth busting. Colin Brown provides original research into the heroes of Waterloo and the myths that have clouded the real story.
Writing to his mother the day after the fighting, Captain Thomas Wildman of the 7th Hussars described 'a victory so splendid & important that you may search the annals of history in vain for its parallel'. Little wonder, for Waterloo was widely recognised – even in its immediate wake – as one of the most decisive battles in history: after more than twenty years of uninterrupted conflict, this single day's encounter finally put paid to French aspirations for European hegemony. The culminating point of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, Waterloo also witnessed levels of determination and bravery by both sides which far exceeded anything experienced by the veterans of Wellington's recent campaigns in Spain and Portugal. Indeed, it was that unconquerable spirit which left over 50,000 men dead on the field of battle and tens of thousands of others wounded. This thoroughly researched and highly detailed account of one of history's greatest human dramas looks first at the wider strategic picture before focusing on the tactical roles played by individual British units – all meticulously examined with the benefit of an extensive array of hitherto unexploited primary sources which reveal the battlefield experience of officers and soldiers as never before. Refusing simply to repeat the same unchallenged accounts and to commit the same errors of previous historians, this work relies exclusively on hundreds of first-hand accounts, by men of all ranks and from practically every British regiment and corps present on that fateful day, to provide a fresh and revised perspective on one of the most pivotal events of modern times.
During October 2016 Paul Dawson visited French archives in Paris to continue his research surrounding the events of the Napoleonic Wars. Some of the material he examined had never been accessed by researchers or historians before, the files involved having been sealed in 1816. These seals remained unbroken until Paul was given permission to break them to read the contents.Forget what you have read about the battle on the Mont St Jean on 18 June 1815; it did not happen that way. The start of the battle was delayed because of the state of the ground not so. Marshal Ney destroyed the French cavalry in his reckless charges against the Allied infantry squares wrong. The stubborn defense of Hougoumont, the key to Wellingtons victory, where a plucky little garrison of British Guards held the farmhouse against the overwhelming force of Jerome Bonapartes division and the rest of II Corps not true. Did the Union Brigade really destroy dErlons Corps, did the Scots Greys actually attack a massed French battery, did La Haie Sainte hold out until late in the afternoon?All these and many more of the accepted stories concerning the battle are analysed through accounts (some 200 in all) previously unpublished, mainly derived through French sources, with startling conclusions. Most significantly of all is the revelation of exactly how, and why, Napoleon was defeated.Waterloo, The Truth at Last demonstrates, through details never made available to the general public before, how so much of what we think we know about the battle simply did not occur in the manner or to the degree previously believed. This book has been described as a game changer, and is certain to generate enormous interest, and will alter our previously-held perceptions forever.
After the Battle of Waterloo, Britain actively incorporated the victory into their national identity. 'Who Owned Waterloo?' demonstrates that Waterloo's significance to Britain's national psyche resulted in a different battle: one in which civilian and military groups fought to establish claims on different aspects of the battle and its remembrance.--
Historian of Christianity Ken Stewart is intent on setting the record straight about Reformed theology. He identifies ten myths held by either or both Calvinists and non-Calvinists and shows how they are gross mischaracterizations of that theological stream. Certain of these persistent stereotypes that defy historical research often present a tr...
Major Richard Llewellyn, who fought at Quatre Bras, wrote in 1837 that, 'Had it not been so closely followed by the... victory of Waterloo, perhaps the gallant exploits and unexampled bravery that marked that day would... have excited even more admiration than was actually associated with it.' This book stands out from the wealth of Napoleonic literature in that it is the first English-language account to focus solely on the battle of Quatre Bras. It is based upon extensive research and in many cases unpublished personal accounts from all participating countries, as well as a detailed topographic, aerial survey of the battlefield. These combine to provide a highly personal, balanced and authoritative work. The author unravels the controversies of a battle where commanders made errors of omission and commission and where cowardice rubbed shoulders with heroism. This is the story of a battle that turned a campaign; of triumph and disaster. It is a story of two great generals, but more importantly, of the intense human experience of those that they led. It is a book that will appeal to both the scholar and the generalist.
The story of Waterloo, the battle that finally ended Napoleon's imperial dreams: how it was fought, how it has been remembered, and what it has come to mean.
