From: Carl von Clausewitz and Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington. On Waterloo: Clausewitz, Wellington, and the Campaign of 1815. Ed./trans. Christopher Bassford, Daniel Moran, and Gregory W. Pedlow. Clausewitz.com, 2010. ISBN-10: 1453701508. ISBN-13: 9781453701508. 318pp. List price: $18.00.
NOTES
TO PART 4
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[1] Charles Cecil Cope Jenkinson (1784-1851), Third Earl of Liverpool, inherited his title in 1828. During the Napoleonic Wars he had served as a British attaché in Vienna and as a volunteer in the Austrian Army during the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805, so he was quite familiar with the German language. See Dictionary of National Biography [hereafter cited as DNB], 63 vols. (London: Smith Elder & Co., 1885-1900), 29:310-311.
[2] University of Southampton, Wellington Papers (hereafter cited as WP).
[3] This refers to Prussian General Hans David Ludwig Yorck von Wartenburg (1759-1830), commander of the Prussian corps on the left wing of Napoleon’s advance into Russia. On 30 December 1812, he signed the Convention of Taurrogen with the Russians, making his force neutral and paving the way for Prussia to change sides and enter the war on the side of the Allies. See Peter Paret, Yorck and the Era of Prussian Reform, 1807-1815 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966); John Keegan and Andrew Wheatcroft, Who’s Who in Military History from 1453 (Leicester, 19), 337.
[4] Col. John Gurwood (1790-1845) served as a captain in the 10th Hussars at Waterloo, where he was severely wounded. He subsequently became Deputy Lieutenant of the Tower of London and private secretary to the Duke of Wellington, during which time he edited the Duke’s papers and published Dispatches of the Duke of Wellington (London, 1837-1844). See DNB 23:370.
[5] Clausewitz actually died in 1831, and his works were published between 1832 and 1837.
[6] Lord Francis Egerton (1800-1857) was born Lord Francis Leveson Gower and subsequently inherited the estates of Francis Egerton, Duke of Bridgewater. He became the First Earl of Ellesmere in 1846, so he did not yet have that title during the correspondence relating to Wellington’s Memorandum. DNB 17:157-158.
[7] Egerton’s note: “The first rough draft of my Article.” He is referring to a draft of his article reviewing Rauschnick’s Marschall Vorwärts (a biography of Blücher), which was published in the Quarterly Review in September 1842. Ellesmere (Egerton) recalled in hisPersonal Reminiscences of the Duke of Wellington by Francis, the First Earl of Ellesmere (New York, E. P. Dutton & Company, 1903), 90, that this “second article which I wrote for the Quarterly on Waterloo was partly a commentary on the work of the Prussian Clausewitz. A translation in MS. of this had been furnished to him by a friend—I believe the late Lord Liverpool. The Duke had some doubt of the competence of the translator, and would not look at it till I had gone over it and certified its accuracy, which I did. He then read it, and made on it comments, some of which appear verbatim in the article in question.”
[8] Egerton’s note: “Gurwood’s first edition of the Dispatches, I think.”
[9] Sir Archibald Alison (1792-1867) was the author of the 10-volume History of Europe from the Commencement of the French Revolution in M.DCC.LXXXIX to the Restoration of the Bourbons in M.DCCC.XV (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1833-1842). The final volume covered the events of 1815. DNB 1:287-290. The Duke strongly disagreed with Alison’s allegation that he had been caught by surprise by Napoleon’s attack.
[10] From Egerton, Personal Reminiscences, 235-236. Charles Arbuthnot (1767-1850) was a civil servant who was best known for being the husband of Harriet Fane Arbuthnot, a close friend and confidant of the Duke of Wellington. After her death in 1834, he moved into the Duke’s residences at Apsley House and Walmer Castle. For more information on the Arbuthnots, see The Seventh Duke of Wellington, ed., Wellington and his Friends: Letters of the First Duke of Wellington to the Rt. Hon. Charles and Mrs. Arbuthnot, the Earl and Countess of Wilton, Princess Lieven, and Miss Burdett-Coutts (London: Macmillan, 1965); DNB 2:61; Neville Thompson, Wellington After Waterloo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 14, 23.
[11] The paper mentioned was an early draft of Wellington’s Memorandum on the Battle of Waterloo, dated 23 July 1842 (see WP 8/1/1), which served as the basis for Egerton’s Quarterly Review article on Blücher. This version of the Memorandum did not mention Clausewitz’s book, because Wellington had thus far seen only the portions of it dealing with Grouchy’s movements and the Battle of Wavre (the chapters of Lord Liverpool’s translation which he had received in September 1840). So at this time Wellington’s main target was Alison’s History of Europe.
[12] Wellington’s total troop strength on the morning of 18 June 1815 was around 70,000 men, so this figure may refer solely to his strength in infantry.
[13] As previously noted, Wellington had so far seen only the Grouchy and Wavre chapters of Liverpool’s translation of Clausewitz’s history of the Waterloo Campaign. There is no indication in the surviving correspondence that the Duke saw any more of the manuscript before September 1842.
[14] The “Horse Guards” Barracks housed the administrative headquarters of the British Army.
[15] John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854) served as editor of the journal Quarterly Review from 1825 until 1853. DNB 34:47-49.
[16] Col. James Freeth is listed as Assistant Quartermaster General in the War Department’s The Army List for August 1842 ( London, 1842), 6.
[17] Egerton published his translation—anonymously—as The Campaign of 1812 in Russia (London: John Murray, 1843).
[18] French General Charles-François Dumouriez (1739-1823) had won the battles of Valmy and Jemappes before falling out of favor with the Revolutionary government and going over to the Allies. From 1804 onward he lived in Britain, where he was active in many schemes against Napoleon and received a substantial pension from the British government. See J. Holland Rose and A. M. Broadley, Domouriez and the Defence of England against Napoleon (London and New York, 1909).
[19] Captain William Siborne (1797-1849) was a British Army officer who joined Wellington’s army of occupation in France in August 1815. An expert surveyor, he was commissioned by the Army in 1830 to build an accurate scale model of the battlefield of Waterloo, and he lived at La Haye Sainte for eight months while carrying out his measurements. He also contacted a number of officers who participated in the battle in order to gather information about the positioning of their units on the battlefield. Siborne subsequently published a very detailed history of the campaign: History of the War in France and Belgium in 1815 (London, 1844; 3rd Revised Edition of 1848 reprinted London, 1990, as History of the Waterloo Campaign.) Many of the letters he received in the course of his research were subsequently published by his son, Major General H. T. Siborne, as Waterloo Letters (London: Cassell, 18; reprinted London, 1993), and additional ones have been published more recently in Gareth Glover, ed., Letters from the Battle of Waterloo: the Unpublished Correspondence by Allied Officers from the Siborne Papers (London and Mechanicsburg, 2004). For more information on Siborne see DNB 52:185-186.
[20] Richard Colley Marquis of Wellesley (1760-1842), Wellington’s oldest brother. The illness proved fatal. Wellesley died on 26 September 1842.
[21] This letter of 27 September 1842 has not been reproduced, as it concerns only the mix-up in letters to Siborne and Liverpool.
