they were only loosely based on fact. But Wellington had also been persuaded, somewhat against his better judgement, to sanction an authorised account of his career, a twelve-volume set of his despatches, edited by Colonel John Gurwood, who became Wellington’s private secretary. Gurwood effectively became Siborne’s rival, approved by the establishment. Like Siborne, he too had a military background. He had been badly wounded in the Peninsular War and was injured in the knee at Waterloo. At the precise point that Siborne was walking the battlefield of Waterloo, he too had set about the task of recording the period of history he had lived through. In 1830, he had been stationed at Portsmouth as a major. ‘Soon after my appointment,’ he recalled, ‘I set to work on the project I had designed 12 years previous, of condensing all the Duke of Wellington’s orders, and obtaining His Grace’s sanction for their publication.’
Gurwood, like Siborne, sought to adhere strictly to the facts. But to do this, he was intent on portraying the Duke in his own words, even at the price of editorial freedom. ‘I will trouble Your Grace to mark any part which may be thought foreign to the purposes for which the Despatches are printed,’ he told him at one point. Wellington was, nonetheless, initially resistant to the idea of publication and rebuffed the approach – ‘Whoever heard of a true history?’ he insisted. But eventually, flattered by Gurwood’s approach and reassured by his own control of the project, he gave his assent. The first volume, his General Orders, was published two years later, in September 1832, and Wellington became an instant convert. The Duke could clearly see that he had managed to control the content as skilfully as he had commanded any army throughout his long military career. The Conservative MP Charles Arbuthnot, whose wife Harriet was a close friend of Wellington, wrote to Gurwood that the Duke ‘has taken the greatest interest in your book. He was so delighted with reading his old orders that he did nothing else all yesterday but read them aloud.’
Within a year, Gurwood had completed the task of putting all Wellington’s public despatches in order so that they might be published. Wellington still had editorial control (‘Your Grace may draw your pen through what may be deemed unnecessary to print’), but by 1835, as another volume was readied for publication, the Duke was again assailed by doubts about the original wisdom of his decision. To complete the publishing task he had set himself Gurwood was forced to fight his corner, as diplomatically as possible, telling Wellington: ‘without the publication of these despatches, the truth will never be known; and posterity will be led into error by the imagination of historians whose narratives will otherwise become hallowed by time as uncontradicted authorities.’ Cautiously, Wellington kept the original proofs for himself so that the changes he made could not be discovered.
Gurwood kept to his task and acquitted himself so well in his balancing act that he was awarded, at Wellington’s instigation, a pension of £200 a year from 1839, and was given the post of Deputy Lieutenant of the Tower of London. ‘You have brought before the publick,’ a grateful Wellington told him, ‘a work which must be essential to statesmen and soldiers as containing the true details of important and military operations of many years duration.’ The Waterloo volume, the twelfth in the series, came out in the late summer of 1838. It was a work which stood as if in contradistinction to the unmediated, democratic access Siborne had gained to the soldiers of Waterloo.
For Siborne, history could not be as straightforward as Gurwood made it. His was neither the official version, nor those of individuals, but the product of intensive evidence-gathering from a wide range of witnesses. This approach was to cause him no end of difficulties. Meticulous both as a modeller and as an historian, Siborne had to reconcile the firsthand accounts of the battle he was obtaining with the official version laid down by the great Duke himself. For a relatively humble member of the army, who wished to present an accurate celebration of a famous victory, but also to further his own career, the pressure must have been enormous. At a personal level, he wished to be true to himself and model exactly what he had found. But on a professional level, he was pressurised by the very military leaders he admired. He could only offer the reassurance that his intentions were noble, and that he would, in keeping with his uncontroversial ambitions, submit the plan of his Model to the Duke of Wellington for approval, not least because, as he had protested, he aimed to do nothing which contradicted one syllable of the Duke of Wellington’s Despatch. But the years ahead would be marked by a growing row over the money he still felt the government should pay him, and by the gathering storm over the nature of his project.
As if to make this clear, the imposing figure of Wellington’s ally, Lord James Henry Fitzroy Somerset, stood in the way of Siborne making further progress with his Model. Somerset, later Lord Raglan of Crimean fame, was a Waterloo veteran whose friendship with Wellington had been a long one. He had served on his staff in the expedition to Copenhagen, and was alongside him during the whole of the Peninsular War first as aide-de-camp and then, from 1811, as his military secretary. In the same role at Waterloo, as military secretary in the general headquarters, he had dealt with all Wellington’s correspondence during the campaign, reading all incoming reports, keeping a register of all documents and liaising with the non-British formations. He was no mere bureaucrat: he had himself been injured in the battle, and his right arm had been amputated. Afterwards, he had taught himself to write with his left hand, and in between two spells as an MP for Truro, he was appointed secretary to the Duke of Wellington when the Duke became master-general of the ordnance in 1819. From 1827 he was again his military secretary, when the Duke became commander-in-chief of the army and he stayed in this role for another twenty-five years, for the rest of the Duke’s life.
But Somerset’s connection with Wellington went deeper than his many decades of service. In 1814 he had married Emily Harriet Wellesley-Pole, the Duke of Wellington’s niece. In army and family matters, Somerset was tied to Wellington, and in the years after Waterloo, he acted as his gatekeeper. Early on, Somerset became unhappy with Siborne’s desire to interview the participants in the battle and to portray its Crisis. In the icily polite but dismissive language of the bureaucrat, a language with which the model-maker was to become familiar in the years ahead, Siborne was sent the first sign that he had become an irritant, and that the military was beginning to wish it had not sanctioned his project. He received this letter from Maj.-Gen. Sir James Charles Dalbiac, the Inspector-General of Cavalry and a Peninsula veteran himself. It was the beginning of years of cuttingly formal exchanges with the country’s bureaucrats.
34, Cavendish Square
5 March 1834
My dear Siborne,
Since the receipt of your letter, I have had several conferences with Lord Fitzroy Somerset.
We think that it would greatly increase your difficulties rather than lead to elucidation to write a circular for information to different general officers who commanded brigades and who from a variety of circumstances must give such very different versions of what passed before their eyes …
Yours faithfully,
J. Chas Dalbiac
Siborne, convinced of the accuracy of his methodology in matters both topographical and historical, would not take the hint. At one point he asked Lieutenant Samuel Waymouth, of the 2nd Life Guards, who was wounded at Waterloo and had been one of the very few officers to be captured by the French, to approach Fitzroy Somerset on Siborne’s behalf. Waymouth reported back: ‘he cannot conceive the possibility of your being able to attain to accuracy, considering how conflicting are the statements one continually hears from persons, all whose testimonies one considers undeniable. If you succeed in giving a tolerably correct representation, it is all you can expect.’
But Siborne was as determined to follow his own course as his portrait by Samuel Lover suggests. His mouth was hard-set against change. His dogged determination blinkered him to ways which might smooth his path ahead to achieve his overall objective, so that he was not in the slightest bit sensitive to recognising any of the political niceties which Somerset raised. Nor was he moved by the idea, put forward by Lord Fitzroy Somerset, that he should give the finished Model to the Duke of Wellington, refusing to realise that such a gesture might win him the necessary political support for its creation.
The result was that Fitzroy Somerset did not receive the most diplomatic of responses. From this point on, conflict was inevitable and Wellington was