A Model Victory

Much of this might have escaped the army’s attention. But in 1830, the twin skills of surveying and model-making were suddenly high on its agenda, for reasons of vanity and prestige. Fifteen years after their triumph at Waterloo, the country’s military leaders were still trying to find an appropriate way to commemorate the battle and to preserve its legend. They thought there should be a museum in London dedicated to the army and the navy, which should contain a suitable exhibit to celebrate Waterloo. Lord Hill, who as a lieutenant-general at Waterloo had gained Wellington’s complete trust, was deputed to find a modeller who could create a miniature version of the battlefield. The French had displayed them for years at Les Invalides, so why not the British?

Siborne had already made a model of the Battle of Borodino, in 1812, and his former colleague in Ireland, Sir George Murray, was now a cabinet minister under Wellington. Murray considered Siborne to be the ideal candidate to make a model of the Battle of Waterloo: he was held to be loyal, diligent, meticulous – and eager to get on. For the first time in Siborne’s career, preferment beckoned. He could not have seen that the twin forces of politics and money would conspire to bring him down.

When Siborne had been chosen to build the Model, Lord Hill contacted the Secretary at War, Sir Henry Hardinge, to arrange the necessary financial backing. The Tory government readily paid his first bill of more than sixty pounds, for the survey of the battlefield. Ministers considered it to be money well spent, an appropriate celebration of the Duke’s great triumph. Then, for Siborne, came disaster. Three years after the election of a Whig prime minister, Earl Grey in 1830, and three years into his project, the government decided it no longer wished to fund such a costly enterprise. Over the next twenty years, the Whigs would cut spending on the army by nearly a fifth, and the Model was seen as an unnecessary cost. Added to which, the new men in the War Office, led by Edward Ellice as Secretary at War, had had a number of run-ins with the Duke. It was clear that Ellice would refuse to sanction spending public money on the project and in this he would find ready acceptance from the Whigs, who thought that the Model would glorify the Tory Wellington. It was an irony which was to rule Siborne’s life for the next decade that the public purse was closed to him by the political opponents of the Duke, who were not overly anxious to celebrate his achievements, while the great man’s supporters came separately to the view that work on his Model should be stopped because it did not celebrate him enough.

Ellice was on safe ground, because he could find no record of the financial agreement Siborne considered he had struck. Siborne was convinced that Sir Henry Hardinge, the previous Secretary at War, had agreed to pay for the whole, completed project, but, curiously for such a meticulous man, Siborne does not seem to have confirmed the deal in writing. The War Office and the Treasury debated the matter between themselves, concluding that Lord Hill had not anticipated the full cost of building the Model, and that Hardinge had only agreed to pay Siborne for the cost of his initial survey. The result was that the government decided to postpone any decision on funding the whole project, leaving Siborne with a deep-felt sense of injustice which would stay with him until his death.

The great expense of creating the Model was outlined in a memorandum written by Siborne in August 1833. In fourteen months, he said he had spent £217 12s 6d, and ‘the principal expenses, namely the moulding and casting of the figures representing the troops, remain to be incurred.’ Yet, he complained, for four months he had heard nothing from the commander-in-chief’s office, or from the Secretary at War, about his mounting bills. So he had himself taken the decision to continue with the Model ‘upon the supposition that the government would not wish me to abandon the undertaking and thus sacrifice the £400 already laid out upon it.’ Siborne calculated that the cost of creating his toy soldiers would amount to between £600 and £700, and the engraving and painting of them to about £100. There would be, he estimated, other expenses of between £200 and £300 before the Model was completed. In short, he needed to find at least £1000.

Siborne’s supporter, Sir Hussey Vivian, wrote to the Secretary at War on 10 November 1833 to make a new plea for funding, but also to suggest, if this failed, that there should be a subscription amongst Siborne’s military friends: ‘I speak from having been three times over the Field since the Battle, and to the expression of my own opinion, I can add that of the Marquess of Anglesey, who inspected the Model with me and who in the strongest terms expressed his approbation. As a National Work I consider the Model will be highly valuable.’

Siborne was not immediately convinced that a public subscription was the right way forward, and feared losing ownership of his project. But the withdrawal of public funding had placed him in an impossible position. Within months, in January 1834, he was so deeply in debt that he acquiesced and formally proposed a subscription. In the draft handbill for the appeal, he revealed the full details of the Model he was trying to build. ‘It may be right to mention,’ he stated, ‘that it will afford an accurate representation of the Battle and its Field, at a particular moment, the Crisis; that the whole of the Troops engaged will be faithfully represented, every corps in its correct position and formation, and that the superficial extent of the Model will occupy a space of about 420 square feet.’

This final paragraph of the subscription was the key to the saga which was about to unfold. Not the staggering size of the great Model, which was extraordinary in itself, nor the cost at which the government had balked. The problem was Siborne’s intention to display the Crisis of the Battle, the point at which the day was won. For as Siborne recorded the views of the participants in the engagement and allotted due weight to their roles in the day’s proceedings, so he increasingly came into conflict with the Duke of Wellington’s account of the battle.

Siborne’s revolutionary idea was to allow the participants in the battle to have their say, not in the personal, romantic way in which some of them wrote their own accounts, but by mediating their stories, crosschecking the facts they provided, and weighing up their evidence. In doing so, he flew in the face of the official version of events, and opposed the Duke of Wellington’s desire to control the narrative of the day. Wellington had refused to endorse any of the books which had been written about the battle, even saying they disgusted him. For history, as Wellington put it, was simply what lay in official reports, and he referred authors to his own brief description of the battle, his Waterloo Despatch.

‘The people of England may be entitled to a detailed and accurate account of the Battle of Waterloo, and I have no objection to their having it,’ Wellington once declared, disingenuously. ‘But I do object to their being misinformed and misled by those novels called “Relations”, “Impartial Accounts”, etcetera, etcetera, of that transaction, containing the stories which curious travellers have picked up from peasants, private soldiers, individual officers … and have published to the world as truth … there is not one which contains a true representation, or even an idea, of the transaction; and this is because the writers have referred as above quoted, instead of to the official sources and reports.’

Siborne had failed to predict that he would be in conflict with the official version of events, laid down in the Duke’s own account. In its sweep and compass, and in its devotion to firsthand accounts of the men who actually fought the battle, Siborne’s historical evidence-gathering was far too revolutionary. His project stood to threaten not just the official view of the battle, but the official view of history – that it was a subject which was best left to those in political and military charge of the country: in short, to Wellington himself.

The Duke of Wellington, by virtue of his deeds in the Peninsular War and then his astounding triumph at Waterloo, had found fame and wealth and a status which, even while he was alive, had made him a hero of the century and a bulwark against political instability. Industrialisation and the growth of the big cities had triggered political unrest which the country’s leaders struggled to contain. England felt like a country which, at any point, might lose its balance, and in these circumstances it looked for certainty, and the Duke of Wellington’s glorious victory at Waterloo had provided an anchor. Wellington reflected the country’s standing in the world, both real and imagined. It was an image he was keen to foster once he had fought his last battle, almost as if he was observing detachedly the man he had become: ‘I am the Duke of Wellington,’ he would say, ‘and must do as the Duke of Wellington doth.’ To this extent, he controlled his image as carefully as any modern politician, sitting for many portraits, attending public functions, and keeping a wary eye on the publication of his military despatches. For many years, the Duke held political power too: as prime minister for two years, until 1830, as foreign secretary under Sir Robert Peel (1834–5), and then as a cabinet minister for five years, again under Peel, from 1841. Despite the hostility he attracted because of his opposition to the electoral Reform Bill, he was still, for many, the embodiment of the age, patriotic, modest, honourable, a gentleman hero, and he was understandably anxious to ensure that the image did not prove to be at variance with reality.

To this end, the Duke had a firm rule when it came to the historical accounts of the battles he had fought: he never read any. Aware that he might be irritated or angered by false comment, he preferred to rise above the storm entirely, to embrace the peace of ignorance and avoid debate or controversy. This, however, was not quite the full story. He was quite prepared to visit the many popular Waterloo entertainments which had become an industry in themselves, and which included vast paintings, theatricals, and even planting trees in public parks in the pattern of troop deployments.

If these events had anything in common, it was that they were only loosely based on fact. But Wellington had also been persuaded, somewhat against his better judgement, to sanction an authorised account of his career, a twelve-volume set of his despatches, edited by Colonel John Gurwood, who became Wellington’s private secretary. Gurwood effectively became Siborne’s rival, approved by the establishment. Like Siborne, he too had a military background. He had been badly wounded in the Peninsular War and was injured in the knee at Waterloo. At the precise point that Siborne was walking the battlefield of Waterloo, he too had set about the task of recording the period of history he had lived through. In 1830, he had been stationed at Portsmouth as a major. ‘Soon after my appointment,’ he recalled, ‘I set to work on the project I had designed 12 years previous, of condensing all the Duke of Wellington’s orders, and obtaining His Grace’s sanction for their publication.’

Gurwood, like Siborne, sought to adhere strictly to the facts. But to do this, he was intent on portraying the Duke in his own words, even at the price of editorial freedom. ‘I will trouble Your Grace to mark any part which may be thought foreign to the purposes for which the Despatches are printed,’ he told him at one point. Wellington was, nonetheless, initially resistant to the idea of publication and rebuffed the approach – ‘Whoever heard of a true history?’ he insisted. But eventually, flattered by Gurwood’s approach and reassured by his own control of the project, he gave his assent. The first volume, his General Orders, was published two years later, in September 1832, and Wellington became an instant convert. The Duke could clearly see that he had managed to control the content as skilfully as he had commanded any army throughout his long military career. The Conservative MP Charles Arbuthnot, whose wife Harriet was a close friend of Wellington, wrote to Gurwood that the Duke ‘has taken the greatest interest in your book. He was so delighted with reading his old orders that he did nothing else all yesterday but read them aloud.’

Within a year, Gurwood had completed the task of putting all Wellington’s public despatches in order so that they might be published. Wellington still had editorial control (‘Your Grace may draw your pen through what may be deemed unnecessary to print’), but by 1835, as another volume was readied for publication, the Duke was again assailed by doubts about the original wisdom of his decision. To complete the publishing task he had set himself Gurwood was forced to fight his corner, as diplomatically as possible, telling Wellington: ‘without the publication of these despatches, the truth will never be known; and posterity will be led into error by the imagination of historians whose narratives will otherwise become hallowed by time as uncontradicted authorities.’ Cautiously, Wellington kept the original proofs for himself so that the changes he made could not be discovered.

Gurwood kept to his task and acquitted himself so well in his balancing act that he was awarded, at Wellington’s instigation, a pension of £200 a year from 1839, and was given the post of Deputy Lieutenant of the Tower of London. ‘You have brought before the publick,’ a grateful Wellington told him, ‘a work which must be essential to statesmen and soldiers as containing the true details of important and military operations of many years duration.’ The Waterloo volume, the twelfth in the series, came out in the late summer of 1838. It was a work which stood as if in contradistinction to the unmediated, democratic access Siborne had gained to the soldiers of Waterloo.

For Siborne, history could not be as straightforward as Gurwood made it. His was neither the official version, nor those of individuals, but the product of intensive evidence-gathering from a wide range of witnesses. This approach was to cause him no end of difficulties. Meticulous both as a modeller and as an historian, Siborne had to reconcile the firsthand accounts of the battle he was obtaining with the official version laid down by the great Duke himself. For a relatively humble member of the army, who wished to present an accurate celebration of a famous victory, but also to further his own career, the pressure must have been enormous. At a personal level, he wished to be true to himself and model exactly what he had found. But on a professional level, he was pressurised by the very military leaders he admired. He could only offer the reassurance that his intentions were noble, and that he would, in keeping with his uncontroversial ambitions, submit the plan of his Model to the Duke of Wellington for approval, not least because, as he had protested, he aimed to do nothing which contradicted one syllable of the Duke of Wellington’s Despatch. But the years ahead would be marked by a growing row over the money he still felt the government should pay him, and by the gathering storm over the nature of his project.

As if to make this clear, the imposing figure of Wellington’s ally, Lord James Henry Fitzroy Somerset, stood in the way of Siborne making further progress with his Model. Somerset, later Lord Raglan of Crimean fame, was a Waterloo veteran whose friendship with Wellington had been a long one. He had served on his staff in the expedition to Copenhagen, and was alongside him during the whole of the Peninsular War first as aide-de-camp and then, from 1811, as his military secretary. In the same role at Waterloo, as military secretary in the general headquarters, he had dealt with all Wellington’s correspondence during the campaign, reading all incoming reports, keeping a register of all documents and liaising with the non-British formations. He was no mere bureaucrat: he had himself been injured in the battle, and his right arm had been amputated. Afterwards, he had taught himself to write with his left hand, and in between two spells as an MP for Truro, he was appointed secretary to the Duke of Wellington when the Duke became master-general of the ordnance in 1819. From 1827 he was again his military secretary, when the Duke became commander-in-chief of the army and he stayed in this role for another twenty-five years, for the rest of the Duke’s life.

But Somerset’s connection with Wellington went deeper than his many decades of service. In 1814 he had married Emily Harriet Wellesley-Pole, the Duke of Wellington’s niece. In army and family matters, Somerset was tied to Wellington, and in the years after Waterloo, he acted as his gatekeeper. Early on, Somerset became unhappy with Siborne’s desire to interview the participants in the battle and to portray its Crisis. In the icily polite but dismissive language of the bureaucrat, a language with which the model-maker was to become familiar in the years ahead, Siborne was sent the first sign that he had become an irritant, and that the military was beginning to wish it had not sanctioned his project. He received this letter from Maj.-Gen. Sir James Charles Dalbiac, the Inspector-General of Cavalry and a Peninsula veteran himself. It was the beginning of years of cuttingly formal exchanges with the country’s bureaucrats.

34, Cavendish Square

5 March 1834

My dear Siborne,

Since the receipt of your letter, I have had several conferences with Lord Fitzroy Somerset.

We think that it would greatly increase your difficulties rather than lead to elucidation to write a circular for information to different general officers who commanded brigades and who from a variety of circumstances must give such very different versions of what passed before their eyes …

Yours faithfully,

J. Chas Dalbiac

Siborne, convinced of the accuracy of his methodology in matters both topographical and historical, would not take the hint. At one point he asked Lieutenant Samuel Waymouth, of the 2nd Life Guards, who was wounded at Waterloo and had been one of the very few officers to be captured by the French, to approach Fitzroy Somerset on Siborne’s behalf. Waymouth reported back: ‘he cannot conceive the possibility of your being able to attain to accuracy, considering how conflicting are the statements one continually hears from persons, all whose testimonies one considers undeniable. If you succeed in giving a tolerably correct representation, it is all you can expect.’

But Siborne was as determined to follow his own course as his portrait by Samuel Lover suggests. His mouth was hard-set against change. His dogged determination blinkered him to ways which might smooth his path ahead to achieve his overall objective, so that he was not in the slightest bit sensitive to recognising any of the political niceties which Somerset raised. Nor was he moved by the idea, put forward by Lord Fitzroy Somerset, that he should give the finished Model to the Duke of Wellington, refusing to realise that such a gesture might win him the necessary political support for its creation.

The result was that Fitzroy Somerset did not receive the most diplomatic of responses. From this point on, conflict was inevitable and Wellington was forced, as on the battlefield, to try to keep events under his absolute control. Siborne had started his project with a naïve belief that he was doing nothing other than bringing credit on the army he so admired, and the generalship of Wellington of which he stood in awe. But as the Model progressed, and he found himself at war with the authorities, his weapons were his doggedness, his obsession with the demands of historical accuracy, his determination to make his precious Model so exact, so meticulously accurate, that the soldiers he so admired would marvel at his powers. Both attributes, his naïveté and his determination, blinded him to the gradual process of obstruction and denigration which came to undermine his finances and his health. Unwittingly, he was challenging the Duke’s Despatches, and taking on the state, by adhering to the simple, if democratic, dictum that history should consist of the properly weighed claims of eyewitnesses, whatever their station in life.

Dublin

8 March 1834

My dear General,

Surely it will be conceded that officers may be able to give a very good version of what passed before their own eyes, as far as relates to themselves and their own corps.

Fortunately, there still exists a considerable number of eyewitnesses of the Battle of Waterloo and it appears to me that the principal utility and advantage of constructing a Model … is to secure, before the favourable opportunity is gone for ever, a well-authenticated representation and record of the positions and movements of the troops engaged…

The only mode of arriving at accurate conclusions essential for such a purpose, is to weigh and compare the statements of those eyewitnesses …

I cannot proceed upon any other principle – it would be useless to trust to the very imperfect unsatisfactory accounts that have hitherto been published, which though they might serve the purpose of the general historian, or of the designer of a battle-piece, become of little or no value to the modeller, who, from the nature of his work, especially when that is constructed upon an unusually large scale, can make no progress without correct data – accuracy, not effect, being the sole object of his labours.

I remain,

My dear General

Your very faithful servant

WS

By the year’s end, a weary Lord Fitzroy Somerset had made his one and only concession, replying tersely, through the chief clerk in the commander-in-chief’s office: ‘Then let him issue his circular and the Lord give him a safe deliverance.’ It was a concession he would bitterly regret, as Siborne’s evidence-gathering reached epic proportions, with dangerously democratic results. With the building of William Siborne’s Great Model of the Field of Waterloo, a new conflict had broken out – the Battle of Waterloo’s history.

Why this should be so is a mystery that lies in the eyewitness accounts which Siborne gathered, and in the separate version the commanders wished to tell. It lies deep in the course of the fighting itself, in the twists and turns of battle, and most importantly of all, in the fragile and sometimes fractious alliance of armies which came together to face the greatest soldier of the age. It is the story of how William Siborne decided how much credit should be awarded to the Prussians, rather than the Duke of Wellington, for the victory which defined the age.

III (#ulink_418612c5-979b-5256-a117-dd90df4346b5)

To the Secretary at War, Edward Ellice

From Sir Hussey Vivian, Commander-in-Chief in Ireland

Dublin, 20 August 1833

My dear Ellice,

I send you a memorandum on the subject of a great national work undertaken under the authority of the general Commander in Chief – a model of the Battle of Waterloo.

Mr Siborne is a very intelligent and clever person. He has taken great pains with this work and has been at a great expense – he was many months on the spot surveying the ground. It is impossible for any thing to be more correct than it is.