The Age of George III

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The Battle of Waterloo: 18 June 1815

After his exile to Elba, Napoleon returned to France in March 1815 to regain his empire in a campaign known as the 'Hundred Days'. On 18 June 1815, the battle was fought that ended the career of Napoleon and ended twenty-two years of European wars that had begun in 1793. At Waterloo the Napoleonic Empire finally crumbled. The battle, fought twelve miles south of Brussels, continued during the whole day, the French foot and cavalry making constant but unavailing attacks on the English lines. Wellington was relying for final victory on the arrival of the Prussians under General Blucher, and late in the afternoon they appeared on the battlefield at the moment when Napoleon had ordered the Imperial Guard to launch itself against the English positions. This attack was already being repelled when the Prussians entered the battle. From that moment it became a rout of the French force.

Napoleon lost the battle for a number of reasons:

• an accident of weather. As before all of Wellington's battles, it rained heavily all the previous night so Napoleon could use neither his guns nor his cavalry to their best advantage. His guns sank up to their axles in the mud and his cavalry could not charge uphill in the soggy conditions. The start of the battle was delayed for about two hours, so that the ground could dry out a little.
• Wellington's tactics were superb. He refused to move from the high ground into the boggy valley, so the French had to take the battle to him, uphill and through mud.
• Wellington used the "thin red line" and hid his troops: this surprised Napoleon, who had never seen this method of fighting. Wellington had perfected them in Spain while Napoleon was occupied in fighting elsewhere.
• Wellington's smaller force held the French to a stalemate from about 11 a.m. (when the battle started), until about 4 p.m. Wellington was about to give the order for a general retreat following Napoleon's order for a general advance, when Blucher arrived and tipped the balance in favour of the Allies.
• Napoleon said he lost Waterloo because of the "obstinate bravery of the English troops" - many of whom were Irish. [1]
• There is an account that Napoleon was not functioning at his best because of a medical problem. It seems that he suffered terribly from haemorrhoids (piles); his physician used leeches to alleviate the pain but during the night of 16 June, the leeches were lost. The physician gave Napoleon laudanum to alleviate the pain but by accident administered an overdose; consequently, at Waterloo, Napoleon's abilities were impaired.

Napoleon fled to Paris, where he found the parliament unwilling to give him further support. Finally, he surrendered to the captain of a British warship, H.M.S. Bellerophon, and was sent to his second exile, this time on the island of St. Helena in the south Atlantic, where he busied himself with writing his memoirs and giving his own version of his triumphs and ultimate defeat. He died in the year 1821.

[1] Although Wellington was the Commander of the forces that fought at Waterloo, there were more non-English troops in his army than there were Englishmen. Napoleon did not differentiate between the various nationalities; English historians have made the same mistake and labelled the Allied army "English". [back]

Retreat to Waterloo by Chevalier Mercer