Duke and Duchess had rented a large mansion with a capacious coach-house which was transformed into a dazzling ballroom. The humble coach-house was decorated with great swathes of scarlet, gold and black fabric, while chandeliers hung between the pillars that were wreathed with foliage, flowers and still more fabric. The guest list glittered too, headed by the Prince of Orange, also known as Slender Billy or the Young Frog. He was twenty-three, Crown Prince of the newly created Kingdom of the Netherlands, and something of a thorn in the Duke’s side, though the Duke liked him personally. The problem was the Young Frog’s father, King William I, who insisted that his eldest son hold high command in the Anglo-Dutch army. Wellington was forced to cede this demand or else manage without the Dutch troops, which meant that a large part of the Duke’s army was under the command of a young man whose only qualification for such responsibility was the fortune of royal birth. He commanded the 1st Corps and, because of Wellington’s insistence that unreliable or inexperienced battalions were brigaded with loyal and veteran units, the Prince commanded some of the Duke’s best British and Hanoverian troops.
The Prince had been an aide-de-camp to the Duke for almost three years in Spain, an experience that had given him a highly exaggerated opinion of his own military talents. He was called Slender Billy because of his strangely long and thin neck, and the Young Frog because he had a high, receding hairline, a wide mouth and prominent eyes. He was supposedly engaged to Princess Charlotte, only daughter of Britain’s Prince Regent, but after she saw Slender Billy get drunk at the Ascot races she broke off the engagement. Slender Billy airily dismissed her rejection, believing, falsely, that she would change her mind. He had similarly dismissed his father’s French-speaking subjects, the Belgians, as ‘idiots’, and because he had been educated at Eton was much more at home among the British than among his compatriots. In the next few days he would be in command of almost a third of Wellington’s army, but fortunately the Young Frog was well served by capable staff officers who, the Duke must have prayed, would rein in his inexperience, self-regard and enthusiasm.
The guests at the ball were the cream of Brussels society, a beribboned throng of diplomats, soldiers and aristocrats, one of whom was General Don Miguel Ricardo de Álava y Esquivel, a soldier who had been appointed Spain’s ambassador to the Netherlands. He had begun his military career in the Spanish navy and had been present at the battle of Trafalgar as a combatant fighting against Nelson’s ships, but the exigencies of war had meant Spain becoming an ally of the British, and Álava, who had joined the Spanish army after Trafalgar, had been appointed as liaison officer to Wellington. Relations between the British and Spanish had been fraught with jealousies, difficulties and mutual misunderstandings, and would have been much worse had it not been for Álava’s cool-headed and sensible advice. A lifelong friendship sprang up between him and the Duke, and the Spaniard would be at the Duke’s side throughout the next few days. He had no business being at Waterloo, but friendship alone made him share the dangers, and Wellington was grateful. Álava has the rare distinction of being one of the very few men who were present at both Trafalgar and Waterloo, though a good number of French also had that distinction, because at least one battalion who fought at Waterloo had served as marines aboard Villeneuve’s doomed fleet.
Sir Thomas Picton was at the ball. He was newly arrived in Brussels, come to command the Duke’s Second Corps, and welcome he was, because Picton was a fighting general who had seen long and successful service in Portugal and Spain. ‘Come on, ye rascals,’ he had shouted as he led an attack at Vitoria, ‘come on, ye fighting villains!’ He was an irascible Welshman, burly and unkempt, but indubitably brave. ‘A rough, foul-mouthed devil,’ the Duke of Wellington described him, but by 1814 the rough, foul-mouthed devil was suffering from what we would know as combat stress reaction. He had written to the Duke begging to be sent home, ‘I must give up. I am grown so nervous, that when there is any service to be done it works upon my mind so that it is impossible for me to sleep at nights. I cannot possibly stand it.’
When Wellington took command of his ‘infamous army’ he sent for Picton. He needed every Peninsular veteran he could find, and the Welshman was a man he could trust to lead and inspire troops. Picton was still suffering. Before leaving Britain he lay down in a newly dug grave and remarked morbidly, ‘I think this would do for me.’ Despite that gloomy premonition he had come to Brussels, though somehow he had managed to mislay his luggage with his uniform, so that he went to battle in a shabby greatcoat and a mouldy brown hat. He must have cut a strange figure among the dazzling uniforms at the ball, amidst all the lace and gold thread, epaulettes and aiguillettes, not to mention the low-cut dresses of the ladies, many of them young English women like the 22-year-old Lady Frances Wedderburn-Webster, who, though married and pregnant, had been seen meeting the Duke of Wellington in a Brussels park just a few days before. A British staff officer had seen the Duke strolling alone in the park, then an open carriage had stopped and Lady Frances stepped out and the couple, the officer wrote, ‘descended into a hollow, where the trees completely screened them’. In time a London newspaper, the St James’s Chronicle, would spread rumours of their affair, claiming that Lady Frances’s husband was threatening a divorce, a report that led to a libel case and severe damages against the Chronicle, but it is interesting, if not significant, that the Duke found time both on the eve of Waterloo and on the day immediately following the battle, to write to Lady Frances.
Wellington liked the company of women, except for his wife, whom he detested. In that taste he was quite unlike Napoleon, who once remarked, ‘We have ruined everything by treating women too well, we have committed the great mistake of putting them almost on a level with ourselves. Nature created them to be our slaves.’ Wellington was more at ease with women, especially clever women, than with men, and he liked it even more if the women were young, pretty and aristocratic. There was gossip in Brussels: the Duke ‘makes a point of asking all the Ladies of Loose character’ complained Lady Caroline Capel, sister to Wellington’s second in command, Lord Uxbridge, who had himself run off with Wellington’s sister-in-law. The Duke was pointedly warned against one such ‘loose’ woman, Lady John Campbell; her character, he was told, was ‘more than Suspicious’. ‘Is it, by God!’ he responded. ‘Then I will go and ask her myself!’, whereupon ‘he immediately took his hat and went out for the purpose’. There were no suspicious rumours about the seventeen-year-old Lady Georgiana Lennox, daughter of the Duchess of Richmond, who dined next to Wellington at her mother’s ball. She asked if the rumours were true and that the French were marching and he nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘they are true, we are off tomorrow.’
It was that imminence of battle which gives the Duchess of Richmond’s ball such piquancy. On the night of 15 June there was a throng of beautifully uniformed officers dancing by candlelight, and within twenty-four hours some would be dead, still wearing their silk stockings and dancing shoes. Wellington’s critics, naturally, carp that he had no business attending a ball when he knew that the French were marching, but the Duke, as ever, had his reasons.
In the first place he did not want to display panic. He had been taken by surprise, and by the time he arrived at the ball, at 10 p.m., he knew he had been wrong-footed by Napoleon, but this was no time to show alarm. He knew he was being observed, so it was necessary to display confidence. The second reason was eminently practical. The Duke needed to issue urgent orders, and virtually every senior officer in his army was at the ball, making it easy for him to find and direct them. The ball, in truth, served as an orders group, and it would have been foolish of the Duke to pass up such an opportunity. Lady Hamilton-Dalrymple, who shared a sofa with him for part of the evening, recollected that ‘frequently in the middle of a sentence he stopped abruptly and called to some officer, giving him instructions’.
So what had happened to invest the ball with such threat?
Hell had broken loose on the road from Charleroi.
* * *
One of Napoleon’s difficulties was self-inflicted. He had ordered the main roads north out of France to be destroyed. The roads were made from a layer of compacted gravel over a bed of larger stones, and for some miles
