The Impact of Royal Military College-Trained Officers on the Battle of Waterloo Part One: Wellington’s Staff By Dr Anthony Morton Sandhurst Occasional Papers No 32 Central Library Royal Military Academy Sandhurst 2020 The Authors SANDHURST OCCASIONAL PAPER NO 32 Dr Anthony Morton is Curator of the Series Editor: Sandhurst Collection. From 1997 to Brig. (Retd.) Ian Thomas OBE MA (Oxon) 2004 Anthony worked as the Archivist Dean of Academic Studies, Faculty of Leadership, for the Royal Logistic Corps Museum Security and Warfare, The Royal Military Academy at Deepcut, during which time he Sandhurst published a number of articles in the Corps journal and co-authored the Editor: millennium publication Our Heritage: J.K. Pearce BA(Hons) PGDipLIS the History and Collections of the Royal Logistic Corps and its © 2019. No part of this publication, except for short Predecessors (2000). From 2004 to extracts, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval 2009 he worked as the Archivist and system, or transmitted in any form without the prior Deputy Curator of the Sandhurst permission of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Collection at the RMAS and since 2009 has held the post of Curator. Anthony ISBN: 978-1-907628-28-3 has published frequently in the Academy journal and was a contributor The views expressed in this paper are solely those of to the publication Sandhurst-A the author and do not necessarily reflect official Tradition of Leadership in 2005 thinking or policy of Her Majesty’s Government, the Ministry of Defence or the Royal Military Academy Online Sandhurst. The Sandhurst Occasional Papers Correspondence and enquiries about the Sandhurst series is available online at: Occasional Paper series should be addressed to: https://www.army.mod.uk/who- The Senior Librarian we-are/our-schools-and- Central Library colleges/rma-sandhurst/faculty- Royal Military Academy Sandhurst for-the-study-of-leadership- Camberley security-and-warfare/ Surrey GU15 4PQ e-mail: RMAS-Gp-Ac- [email protected] Sandhurst Occasional Papers No 32 The Impact of Royal Military College-Trained Officers on the Battle of Waterloo Part One: Wellington’s Staff By Dr Anthony Morton Central Library Royal Military Academy Sandhurst 2020 THE IMPACT OF ROYAL MILITARY COLLEGE-TRAINED OFFICERS ON THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO: PART ONE-WELLINGTON’S STAFF By Dr Anthony Morton 1 ‘Sir John Byng…urged me so strongly to take if but for a day the duty of quartermaster general….an arduous undertaking for anyone from the ranks with no knowledge....’ Lt Col James Hamilton Stanhope, Campaign Journal Paris 1815 ‘..the Military College, in my day, was an admirable school of discipline, as well as education generally, and I have always felt thankful for the training I there received.’ Lt Col Basil Jackson, With Wellington’s Staff at Waterloo 1877 INTRODUCTION The year 2015 saw the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, possibly the most famous battle in British military history and certainly one whose result was of supreme political importance for both Britain and the rest of Europe. The twenty-three years of conflict that became known as the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars began on 1 February 1793 when Revolutionary France declared war on Britain. Eventually drawing in all of Europe’s major powers and many minor ones, and from 1812 even the United States, the wars ended with the final defeat of Napoleon, Emperor of France on the field of Waterloo in Belgium on 18 June 1815 and his subsequent life-long imprisonment on the Island of Saint Helena in the Atlantic Ocean. Waterloo, a victory achieved by an Anglo-Dutch-German army under the command of British Field Marshal Sir Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington and a Prussian army under Field Marshal Gebhard Lebrecht von Blücher, Prince of Wahlstadt, was clearly the climax of the Napoleonic Wars. But it was also arguably the high point in the early history of one of the most famous military institutions to originate from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars that is still in existence today, the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, known before 1947 as the Royal Military College (RMC). The Royal Military College was the brainchild of Lieutenant Colonel John Le Marchant (later to become the first Lieutenant Governor of the College and a Major General) and was created as a direct result of early British military failures against the armies of Revolutionary France. Its Senior Department for the training of staff officers was established at High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire by Royal Warrant on 24 June 1801, and a year later its Junior Department for the training of gentleman cadets for a first commission was established in temporary quarters at Great Marlow in the same county by a further Royal Warrant on 4 May 1802. Despite opposition from some quarters,1 the Royal Military College grew both in size and popularity until by 1811 there were far more applications for the Junior Department than there were cadet vacancies. Its reputation for producing well-trained professional officers was confirmed by a letter published in the June 1811 issue of the Royal Military Chronicle that stated the Royal Military College was ‘rapidly effecting a very desirable change…., not only by the numerous accomplished officers they produce, but in the desire of knowledge which has thereby been disseminated through the Army’.2 In 1813, shortly before the Senior Department moved to Farnham in Surrey and a year after the Junior Department moved to its permanent accommodation at Sandhurst on the Surrey/Berkshire border, Queen 1 See Tomkinson pp. 218-221 for a slightly bizarre diatribe complaining about the short-comings of young subaltern officers in the British Army such as lack of foreign language skills, especially French, while at the same time criticizing the Royal Military College for not teaching cadets such relevant skills despite the fact that French and German were clearly taught at the College. See Morton 2019 for a summary of the college curriculum in the early years of the RMC. 2 Royal Military Chronicle Vol II p. 135. Cf Thoumine p. 145. 2 Charlotte presented the College with its first set of Regimental Colours. The Royal Military College was– and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst is-the only military training establishment in the history of the British Army to be so honoured, a fact indicative of the high regard in which the College was held. Yet despite the contribution of the many hundreds of RMC-trained officers who served in the British Army during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the victory at Waterloo that brought those wars to an end soon meant that both government and public interest in the College, and indeed in the army in general, waned. The Treasury was keen to reap what today would be called the ‘peace dividend’ and a succession of defence cuts by the government caused the College to enter a period of slow decline in the following decades. It would not be until the mistakes of the Crimean War made clear the need for large numbers of educated, professionally trained officers that the Royal Military College was once again seen as an institution of national importance.3 THE RMC AND THE WATERLOO CAMPAIGN 1815 PART ONE The Royal Military College trained 168 (just over 12%) of the approximately 1,395 British staff, cavalry and infantry officers4 who served in the Waterloo campaign, also known as the Hundred Days or War of the Seventh Coalition.5 Twenty-two officers had studied at the Senior Department and/or its predecessor the Staff School, while the rest were former cadets of the Junior Department (see appendix 1 table A). Another four officers who took part in the campaign were former College staff including instructors and administrative personnel. Twenty-nine RMC-trained officers and one former instructor of the RMC held staff appointments in Wellington’s army and made up about nineteen per cent of his staff officers in total, while the remaining 139 RMC-trained officers and three former College members of staff served with their regiments. The rest of this paper will survey the twenty-nine RMC-trained staff officers and one former instructor who helped manage and organise Wellington’s army during the Waterloo campaign as well as intervening at crisis points on the field of battle (a subsequent paper will cover the 139 RMC-trained regimental officers who led their regiments into battle at Waterloo). Included in part one is a summary of the parts played in the campaign and battle of Waterloo by the officers concerned. Part two of this paper contains more detailed notes on the individual officers preceded in each case by a summary of their pre-1815 military career in italics. RMC-TRAINED STAFF OFFICERS About half of the RMC-trained staff officers serving with Wellington’s army in 1815 were former cadets who had trained in the Junior Department of the Royal Military College while the remainder were former (or in some cases current) students from its Senior Department. This even split is not that surprising given that at this early stage in the development of the Royal Military College elements of the courses taught by each department were quite similar in content. (It is worth noting that eleven former cadets who fought with their regiments at Waterloo had held staff appointments prior to 1815 and eight former students trained as staff officers served as regimental officers in the campaign.)6 3 Shepperd pp 41ff. 4 This figure includes the officers of the British 6th Infantry Brigade stationed at Hal as part of the force deployed there by Wellington to guard the road to Brussels and act as a rear guard in case he was defeated at Waterloo.