I think it was entirely understandable, and right, that Churchill was given a state funeral with the degree of extensive broadcast coverage that that entailed. He was after all the man who played a leading role in helping to save Britain and many other countries from the terrible fate that would have followed an Axis victory. For all the glaring faults in his character and public service that appeared at other periods of his life, for this he was owed a great debt by the people of Britain. Perhaps the only other example in British history was Nelson, also given a state funeral in 1806:
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An apt comparison, aeolium.
This extract from Tennyson's Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington - parts of the Ode not inappropriate to Churchill.:
Thine island loves thee well, thou famous man,
The greatest sailor since our world began.
Now, to the roll of muffled drums,
To thee the greatest soldier comes;
For this is he
Was great by land as thou by sea;
His foes were thine; he kept us free;
O give him welcome, this is he
Worthy of our gorgeous rites,
And worthy to be laid by thee....
The Duke of Wellington's funeral the only other comparable one (scroll down to Death and Funeral)
I saw the funeral on a grainy B&W TV set at school. In 1969 I cycled over from Oxford to Bladon to look at the grave.
ps, snap, vinteuil...Comment
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Ah, yes. Somehow I never think of Wellington as being in the rank of those other figures, though he did receive a state funeral. Wasn't he saved by Blücher's Prussians at Waterloo?Originally posted by vinteuil View PostComment
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Here we go again! I was in any case thinking of starting a Waterloo thread. But, it's quite simple. Napoleon set out to defeat his enemies singly before they could get together. The Austrians and Russians were advancing from the east. Napoleon struck north into Belgium, to knock out the Allied (English, Hanoverian, Dutch, Brunswick etc.) army, and the Prussians, hopefully separately. Wellington rode over to meet Blucher on 16 June to discuss tactics, before the battles of Ligny and Quatre Bras (the day after the Duchess of Richmond's ballOriginally posted by aeolium View Post
) and on the 17th, the day before Waterloo, Wellington told the Prussian General Gneisenau's messengers that "he would accept a battle in the position of Mont St Jean [Waterloo] if the Field Marshal [Blucher] were inclined to come to his assistance even with one corps only". It was the plan that they defeat Napoleon together. In the event Blucher's army evaded its French pursuers (Grouchy plus 30,000) and made it in time, but only just.
There are some excellent new and recent books on Waterloo. I'll start another thread.Comment
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Excellent swift answer, which saves me the trouble. Looking forward to perusing the Waterloo thread.Originally posted by Richard Tarleton View PostComment
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Thanks for the response, RT. I know this question is in the dread and despised area of counter-factual history, but if Napoleon had won at Waterloo would it have been decisive? After all, he was still facing a coalition including Britain, Prussia, Russia, Austria, Sweden, the Netherlands and several German states with great superiority in numbers. He may have been able to delay his eventual defeat but perhaps not for very long?
[Apologies for derailing the Churchill thread - perhaps these posts re Waterloo can be hived off to the Waterloo thread when it appears]Comment
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Indeed - one of the great what-ifs.
Give me until later today!Comment
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And returning to the topic, there is another showing on BBC Parliament at 9 pm tonight (31/1/15) of a lecture by Vernon Bogdanov on Churchill's legacy:
Also available on iplayer.Comment
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English army? So who were these soldiers fighting for? Other Scottish regiments were there, too, including the Gordon Highlanders.Originally posted by Richard Tarleton View Post
This is yet another egregious example of the all-too-common habit of the misuse of "English" where "British" is correct. The words are by no means synonymous. Where's that thread about phrases that set teeth on edge?Comment
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Deep shame, mangerton - the perils of writing in a hurryOriginally posted by mangerton View Post
I should have got that right, not least because this chap, the brother of our 15th clan chief, was nominated by Wellington to receive the award from an (English) parson to go to the bravest man in the British army, for his role in the defence of Hougoumont on Wellington's right flank. My 4xgreat grandfather David aka Donald MacDonell took part on the Peninsula War in the Portuguese army, as did many British officers (and former Jacobites after the '45....)
Yes, the Gordons, the Camerons....not to mention the Scots Greys - James was in the Coldstream Guards.Comment
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It's interesting how Waterloo was just one in a long line of battles in Northern France and Flanders over six centuries from the Hundred Years' War. Richard Holmes wrote an excellent book about it, called Fatal Avenue:
How much blood was spilt in that relatively small land area over the centuries.
(Holmes also wrote a very good study of Churchill, In the Footsteps of Churchill)Comment
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Waterloo, 18 June 1815
With the anniversary only 5 months away, there is a slew of new books on the subject (to add to the already huge literature) and I thought I'd like to share some of my recent reading. This is with all due deference to the many scholars out there, not least on this forum, who will have read a great deal more than me.
I was hooked on the period at school, and went on to study it at university. David Chandler's The Campaigns of Napoleon was published the year I took my history A level (1966) as was Felix Markham's biography of Napoleon. Markham came to talk to our school history sixth form. Researching our family history more recently has renewed my interest.
A fine single-volume, 400-page account of the battle that is spoken of respectfully by subsequent authors is Alessandro Barbero's The Battle (2005) - written in Italian but superbly translated by John Cullen. This book is only let down by a paucity of detailed maps - essential to an understanding of the battle.
New to the field is Tim Clayton's 500-page Waterloo (2014). Clayton, with Phil Craig, is already the author of a great book on Trafalgar. This is a fine account of the whole Waterloo campaign, from Napoleon's invasion of the Netherlands onwards. So you get detailed accounts of the battles of Ligny and Quatre Bras, the battle of Waterloo itself starting around page 300. It gives a good sense of the sheer scale of huge armies billeted over large areas of countryside, and the logistics involved in sustaining them, as well as being well stocked with contemporary quotes. On the latter topic, Gareth Glover's Letters from the Battle of Waterloo (2005) contains large quantities of unpublished correspondence gathered by William Siborne in the 1830s and 40s for his History.
Holding a magnifying glass to a particular part of the battle, another new book is Brendan Simms' The Longest Afternoon (2014) - the story of the defence (until its fall around 6.30 pm) of La Haye Sainte, the farm in front of the centre of Wellington's army. The farm was heroically defended by men of the King's German Legion - they were finally forced to withdraw when they ran out of ammunition and could not be re-supplied. Unfortunately the farm had not been properly prepared, the pioneers having been sent the night before to prepare Hougoumont Farm in front of Wellington's right flank. This chateau and farm was successfully defended all day. Napoleon began with an assault on it that was supposed to draw troops from Wellington's centre, but the reverse happened - Reille and Prince Jerome were so determined to capture it that it sucked 13,000 French troops into a struggle (against a maximum of 2,000 British, German and Nassauers at any one time) which Napoleon didn't have to win. An account of this struggle is to be found in Julian Paget's Hougoumont (1992), but a minutely detailed account is in Mark Adkin's The Waterloo Companion (2001) - an essential guide to every possible aspect of the battle and one which no Waterloo buff can afford to be without.
Finally - and passing swiftly over Bernard Cornwell's Waterloo (2014), , we come to a remarkable new book by Nigel Sale, The Lie at the Heart of Waterloo (2014) which forensically dissects events during the last half hour of the battle. Having himself served in the Royal Greenjackets, the former 52nd Light Infantry, he was always struck by the lack of credit given to the crucial intervention of Sir John Colborne and the 52nd in attacking the left flank of the Middle Guard during Napoleon's last throw of the dice. The credit is always given to Wellington and the 2nd and 3rd battalions of the First Foot Guards (Up Guards and at 'em, etc.), but the truth is remarkably different - everything from the formation in which the Imperial Guard advanced, which Guards units they had contact with, the fact that Wellington (with Uxbridge) followed the 52nd down the battlefield and witnessed their rout of the Imperial Guard before returning (via Hougoumont) to order the general advance....the spot where Uxbridge's leg was hit (which undermines the official version)....Wellington does not emerge well from the analysis, having buried the story of Colborne's intervention before writing his famous Despatch to Lord Bathurst. In fact Colborne and the 52nd arrived at La Belle Alliance at roughly the same time as Ziethen's Prussians...Wellington even erred over where he met Blucher. With ample opportunity to set the record straight in later years, Wellington preferred not to. I cannot recommend this book too highly. The maps, quite apart from anything else, are meticulous. And it's sad that a topographical feature essential to an understanding of the battle was removed to create a monument, the Lion Mound, to the Prince of Orange. As Wellington said, "They've ruined my battlefield".Comment
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Many thanks for this survey, RT. I hope some kind host will yank the posts relating to Waterloo over from the Churchill thread.
What I mainly notice about the books you describe - none of which, I'm ashamed to say, I have read - is the apparent paucity of works putting the battle in the context of a wider history, not just earlier to the French Revolution and the other Napoleonic Wars but beyond to what came after. David Reynolds in an essay I linked to on another thread (Policy and the Study of History on the Ideas forum) alluded to the trend towards specialisation in history and away from what he calls 'big history' (and elsewhere, the longer view). I'm sure some of the works you mention do put the battle in context but it is the longer view that is of more interest to me, but I suppose I've never been that interested in military history.Comment
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... which presumably covers similar territory to John Keegan's masterpiece "The Face of Battle", analysing Agincourt, Waterloo, the battle of the Somme -Originally posted by aeolium View PostIt's interesting how Waterloo was just one in a long line of battles in Northern France and Flanders over six centuries from the Hundred Years' War. Richard Holmes wrote an excellent book about it, called Fatal Avenue:
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