Abstract
Ireland’s experience of the Waterloo campaign has been consistently under-explored, despite the degree of attention paid to the campaign by historians. This paper shows that that experience was far more significant and multi-faceted than has generally been recognised. Irish people played an important practical role in the events of 1815. Irish soldiers saw service in their thousands during the campaign, at every rank from private to general. These men represented a comprehensive cross-section of contemporary Ireland, coming from every county on the island and from every kind of socio-economic background. Some Irish soldiers and military units earned distinction for their actions on the battlefield and a number of participants from the country left valuable primary testimony. Civilian Irish women and children were also caught up in events in Belgium. Domestically, Ireland was a centre of activity as hostilities against Napoleon developed and analysis of contemporary media coverage and private correspondence makes it clear that ongoing events on the Continent had a keenly engaged Irish audience. Waterloo also left a distinctive legacy for Ireland and for Irish people. This paper explores all of these issues in detail, providing a thorough examination based on primary sources to address the impact of Waterloo on Ireland, and of the Irish on Waterloo.
Highlights
Seven-and-thirty years have elapsed since the day of Waterloo, and yet the memory of it is so rife, and the interest belonging to it so revived, and so powerful when awakened, that it requires an effort to detach oneself from it, having once touched it
As its bicentenary draws near at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Waterloo campaign remains a significant event in modern history
While settling on a definitive figure for Irish military representation during the campaign has been understandably unfeasible for an examination on this scale, it seems likely that that figure must number in thousands rather than hundreds
Summary
Seven-and-thirty years have elapsed since the day of Waterloo, and yet the memory of it is so rife, and the interest belonging to it so revived, and so powerful when awakened, that it requires an effort to detach oneself from it, having once touched it. The Waterloo companion (2001)[9], for example, Mark Adkin’s admirable recent reference work on the campaign, makes a firm effort at providing a multilateral assessment of events in 1815; an objective displayed in modern histories like Andrew Uffindel and Michael Corum’s On the fields of glory (1996) and Alessandro Barbero’s The battle (2005).[10] British historian Peter Hofschröer has succeeded over the past decade and a half in shedding necessary light on the role played by smaller national contingents at Waterloo, as well as providing a revised perspective on Prussia’s role in the campaign.[11] Collectively, it may be argued that this new pattern of assessment amounts to an appreciation that the legacy of Waterloo is no more a British or French national property than it is a German or Dutch possession; but instead represents something of communal significance to Europe as a whole.
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