Titans of History (40 page)

1769–1852

Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won
.

Duke of Wellington, in a dispatch from Waterloo (June 1815)

Arthur Wellesley, duke of Wellington, was one of the ablest generals of his age, and—with Oliver Cromwell, Admiral Nelson and the duke of Marlborough—stands among the greatest British military leaders
of all time. His victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, which he described as “a damned nice thing—the closest run thing you ever saw,” was a clash of the two most brilliant European generals of their day.

Wellesley, who was born in Dublin to an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, the earl of Mornington, was not an exceptional young man, intellectually or physically. He gave up his one striking talent, for playing the violin, in 1793, burning his instrument in a fit of melodrama. He entered the army and relied on the patronage of his more successful eldest brother to rise through the officer ranks to the position of lieutenant colonel and head of his regiment.

Wellesley went to India in 1797, studying books on war and military tactics during the long voyage. The effort paid off. In 1802 he confronted a force of 50,000 French-led Maratha soldiers at Assaye. Through an unconventional choice of field positions and brave leadership in a bloody battle, Wellesley won against imposing odds. He later called it the finest thing he had ever done in the fighting line.

Returning home in 1805, Wellesley was knighted, married the short-sighted, timid Kitty Pakenham (with whom he was never happy) and was sent for brief stints of duty in Denmark and Ireland, where he distinguished himself further. But it was his departure to fight the French on the Iberian Peninsula in 1808 that almost ended his career: frustrated by shared commands with inept generals, he rashly signed a treaty with the French without reading its foolish terms. He was hauled before an inquiry and criticized—but survived to advise the secretary of war, Viscount Castlereagh, on how he would wage cheap but effective war. Castlereagh gave him the job that marked the start of Wellesley's ascent to greatness.

Here, the British army had enough men to conduct defensive campaigns, and even to besiege large towns and castles, but insufficient strength to take advantage of these successes. He defeated
the French at Talavera (for which he received a peerage, becoming Viscount Wellington), and managed to defend Lisbon from French attack by secretly building a network of fortifications. Despite a succession of British victories, at Vimeiro, Busaco, Almeida and elsewhere, Viscount Wellington was often frustrated in his ambitions to press on from Portugal into Spain.

By 1812 things had improved. Wellington fought his way to Madrid and persuaded the Spanish government to appoint him
generalissimo
of its own armies. By 1814 the French had been pushed back to their own border and he invaded Napoleon's own country. Wellington made sure his armies were better organized and better supplied than the French. He imposed superior discipline on his troops, and he did his best to respect the religion and property of the Spanish people, valuable lessons learned in India. He described his troops as “the scum of the earth.” He had defeated Marshal Massena, perhaps the finest French general, but had never faced Napoleon himself and hoped he would never have to do so.

By now Wellington was the most famous man in England. He had won a dukedom, the ambassadorship to France, and the role as British representative at the Congress of Vienna. He was the recipient of honors from governments of Europe. But in 1815 he was to face the ultimate test of his military mettle.

Napoleon, who had abdicated and then been exiled to Elba in 1814, had escaped and begun to rally troops around him. Wellington was the only man in Europe considered worthy enough to command the allied forces against the emperor as he plotted to attack the Low Countries. Wellington was unimpressed by his own combined forces, calling them “an infamous army, very weak and ill equipped.” He also had little knowledge of Napoleon's plans for the battlefield and was taken aback when French troops began to move on June 15, 1815. “Napoleon has humbugged me, by God!” he exclaimed; but when the two armies met on June 18, Wellington
had arranged his forces into a defensive formation that was to prove extremely resilient against the waves of bludgeoning French attacks that Napoleon launched.

Throughout the long, hard battle, Wellington remained calm, though his Prussian reinforcements, under Marshal Blücher, arrived late and virtually every man of his personal staff was killed or wounded. “I never took so much trouble about any battle, and was never so near being beat,” he wrote afterward. But this victory, his last, was resounding, and Wellington was lauded right across the continent.

As a commander, Wellington was distinguished by his acute intelligence, sangfroid, planning and flexibility but also by his loathing for the suffering of battle. As a man, he was sociable, enjoying close friendships with female friends and a long line of affairs with high-born ladies and low-born courtesans, including a notorious French actress whom he shared with Napoleon himself. When one such courtesan threatened him with exposure, he replied: “Publish and be damned.”

After Waterloo, Wellington's prestige gave him great influence on government. By the 1820s he had been drawn into partisan politics, not his natural territory, although he was at heart a Tory and a reactionary. He served, with difficulty, as prime minister (1828–30), but he secured an agreement on Catholic emancipation—political representation for Catholics, especially important for Ireland. However, his opposition to the clamor for parliamentary reform led him to resign the premiership. He was briefly prime minister again in 1834, holding every secretaryship in the government. In 1842 he resumed his position as commander-in-chief of the British army, a post he held until his death.

A million and a half people turned out to see his funeral cortège make its way to St. Paul's Cathedral in 1852. “The last great Englishman is low,” wrote the poet laureate Alfred Tennyson.

1769–1821

Napoleon was a man! His life was the stride of a demi-god
.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
Conversations with Eckermann
(1828)

Napoleon Bonaparte bestrode his era like a colossus. No one man had aspired to create an empire of such a magnitude since the days of Alexander the Great and Charlemagne. Napoleon's ambition stretched from Russia and Egypt in the east to Portugal and Britain in the west, and even though he did not succeed to quite this extent, his brilliant generalship brought Spain, the Low Countries, Switzerland, Italy and much of Germany under French domination—albeit at the cost of two decades of war and some 6 million dead. Although his enemies regarded him as a tyrant—and indeed much about his rule was oppressive—Napoleon introduced to mainland Europe many of the liberal and rational values of the Enlightenment, such as the metric system of weights and measures, religious toleration, the idea of national self-determination, and the Napoleonic Code of civil law. He was the quintessential autocrat but he was tolerant of all beliefs and ideas, provided he enjoyed political control. He did not—with a few exceptions—abuse his power. He lacked malice and he was certainly no mass-murdering sadistic dictator in the mode of the 20th century. Yet millions died for the sake of his personal ambition in the wars that he promoted.

After an unruly childhood, a youthful military education, and service in his native Corsica during the French Revolution,
Napoleon rose to prominence as an artillery expert in the defense of the town of Toulon against the British in 1793. Two years later he was in Paris, taking command of the artillery against a counter-revolutionary uprising. He boasted that he cleared the streets with “the whiff of grapeshot.”

In 1796 Napoleon led a French army into Italy, driving the Austrians out of Lombardy, annexing several of the Papal States, then pushing on into Austria, forcing her to sue for peace. The resulting treaty won France most of northern Italy, the Low Countries and the Rhineland. Napoleon followed this up by seizing Venice.

Napoleon was now regarded as the potential savior of France, and he ensured that the republic was reliant on his personal power within the army. The government welcomed the respite when Napoleon sailed to Egypt to bolster French interests there at the expense of the British. In the campaign of 1798–9 he seized Malta, then defeated an Egyptian force four times as large as his own at the Battle of the Pyramids. Though the French navy lost control of the Mediterranean after Nelson's victory at the Battle of the Nile, Napoleon pushed through Egypt into Syria, until his army succumbed to disease. The failure to take Acre marked the end of the war. In his advance and retreat, he showed his ruthless ambition: he massacred Ottoman prisoners and as he retreated, he ordered his doctors to kill some of his own wounded. Even though his dirty little Middle Eastern war had been a disaster, he abandoned his army and returned to France presenting the adventure as a success—indeed his tales of exotic glory now propelled him to power.

In 1799 Napoleon seized control of France in the Coup of 18 Brumaire. As first consul, he improved the road and sewerage systems and reformed education, taxes, banking and, most importantly, the law code. The Napoleonic Code unified and transformed
the legal system of France, replacing old feudal customs with a systematized national structure and establishing the rule of law as fundamental to the state.

In 1804 Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of the French, ostensibly to prevent the Bourbon monarchy from ever being reestablished. His plan to invade Britain—which was funding his European enemies—was thwarted by Nelson's destruction of Napoleon's navy at Trafalgar. However, on land Napoleon seemed invulnerable, defeating the Austrians, Russians and Prussians in a series of stunning victories at Ulm (1805), Austerlitz (1805) and Jena (1806), ending the alliance of these powers with Britain and establishing the Confederation of the Rhine as a French satellite in much of Germany. The emperors of Austria and Russia, the king of Prussia all bowed before his power: only Britain held out against him.

After this, Napoleon began to overreach himself. He made his brothers into kings, his marshals into princes. In 1808 he imposed his brother Joseph (who had first been king of Naples) as king of Spain, provoking the Spanish to revolt. The British sent troops to support the Spanish, and for the next few years many French troops were tied up on the Iberian Peninsula fighting the Spanish and a British army under Wellington

He had married Josephine de Beauharnais, the widow of a French aristocrat, for love—but she had failed to give him an heir. He divorced her and hoped to marry a sister of the Russian Tsar Alexander I—a match both prestigious and politic, since the security of his precarious empire depended on his personal friendship with the tsar, as agreed at Tilsit. But Alexander, initially dazzled by Napoleon, was no longer so impressed: Russia was turning against French dominance. Alexander refused the marriage—and Napoleon instead married Grand Duchess Marie-Louise, the Habsburg daughter of Austrian Emperor Francis. She gave
him a son, Napoleon, the king of Rome. But the Russians began to withdraw from Napoleon's blockade of Britain.

In 1812 Napoleon amassed the
Grande Armée
of around 600,000 men to march on Russia. It was his moment of hubris. The Russians avoided engagement and retreated deep into the interior, implementing a scorched-earth policy as they went. When the Russians finally made a stand outside Moscow, at the Battle of Borodino, it was one of the bloodiest encounters in history. Though he took Moscow, Napoleon could not force the Russians to the negotiating table, and, with its lines of supply drastically over-extended, the
Grande Armée
was obliged to retreat through the bitter cold of the Russian winter. Only 40,000 men made it back to France.

Heartened by Napoleon's humiliation, the other European powers formed a new alliance against the French. The allies defeated Napoleon's forces in Spain and at Leipzig, taking Paris in 1814 and exiling Napoleon to the island of Elba.

But Napoleon was not done. Escaping from Elba in 1815, he made a triumphant progress north through France to Paris, telling the troops sent to stop him, “If any man would shoot his emperor, he may do so now.” His old generals and their armies rallied round him, but the glorious Hundred Days of his restoration came to an end on June 18, 1815 near the little settlement of Waterloo in what is now Belgium. As the duke of Wellington, the British commander, conceded, it was “the closest run thing”; but Napoleon's defeat was decisive.

The emperor was exiled to St. Helena in the South Atlantic, dying of stomach cancer in 1821. Later, when Wellington was asked whom he reckoned to have been the best general ever, he answered: “In this age, in past ages, in any age, Napoleon.”

1770–1827

Sweet sounds, oh, beautiful music, do not cease!
Reject me not into the world again.
With you alone is excellence and peace,
Mankind made plausible, his purpose plain
.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, “On Hearing a Symphony of Beethoven” (1928)

Ludwig van Beethoven's music encompassed the transition between the Classical and Romantic styles, and his astounding contribution was all the more remarkable for being completed against the background of the encroaching deafness that plagued the last thirty years of his life. His nine symphonies raised the genre of orchestral music to a grand level, while his late-period string quartets and piano sonatas are some of the most transcendent achievements in classical music.

Born in Bonn, Germany, Beethoven was of Flemish descent. Both his father, Johann van Beethoven, and grandfather worked as court singers to the elector-archbishop of Bonn. Unfortunately, however, his father was also an alcoholic, who attempted to raise the family fortunes by touting his second son Ludwig as a child prodigy, somewhat unsuccessfully.