The Regency Decade: 1814 Part 2: Peace at Last

The Napoleonic wars were over. On 5 April 1814, despatches arrived in London via Antwerp announcing the fall of Paris to the Allied armies. The news spread rapidly, carried by the stage and mail coachmen. Church bells rang and the populace poured onto the streets to celebrate. Soon premises all over Britain were illuminated, their windows displaying transparencies depicting the fall of the Corsican tyrant and celebrating peace and victory. On 9 April, the Times reported that Napoleon had abdicated. In subsequent negotiations, he was exiled to the island of Elba over which he was given sovereignty while his wife Marie Louise was made Duchess of Parma, Placentia and Guastalla. Napoleon was to receive an income of 2 million francs a year, and members of the Bonaparte family were promised pensions to be paid by the French government. He would return ‘with the violets’ i.e. in the Spring, he promised, and the modest flower became a symbol for the deposed Emperor. In this little engraving of a bunch of violets, the silhouettes (here outlined in blue) of Napoleon, Marie Louise and their young son were hidden.

On 20 April, fifty-nine-year-old Louis XVIII, brother of the guillotined Louis XVI, who had lived in exile since 1791, and in England since 1808, set out for London. He was met at the Abercorn Arms in Stanmore, some ten miles from the city, by a large delegation led by the Prince Regent and escorted in state in a procession led by one hundred Gentlemen on horseback and including six royal carriages, in the second of which sat the King and the Prince Regent. Onlookers along the route cheered the royal party, displaying laurels and white ribbons as they passed. Finally, the procession reached Grillon’s Hotel where the king was to lodge. On 23 April, hostilities were suspended between Great Britain and France and on the 24th the King set sail for France.

The Regent's domestic troubles continued, the populace siding with his estranged wife, the Princess of Wales. On 2 June, his daughter and heir, eighteen-year-old Princess Charlotte, was formally presented to her grandmother, the Queen, by the Tsar’s sister, the Grand Duchess of Oldenburgh. On his way to the Drawing-room, the Prince was beset by ‘the most dismal yells, groans and hisses’ so that the horses were put to their full speed to carry him through this ‘ungracious scene’. It was hoped that the princess would make a match of it with the Hereditary Prince of Orange but she refused, to her father’s wrath and the entertainment of the cartoonists of the day. Here he threatens his daughter's ladies while, on the right, the princess makes her escape to seek refuge with her mother. Advice and counsel was sought on all sides and public uproar only averted when she agreed, at five a.m. the following morning, to return to her home at Warwick House, but not before she signed a minute witnessed by the Duke of Sussex and the future Lord Brougham that she was resolved not to marry the Prince of Orange.

Some days later, the victorious Allied Sovereigns—the Emperor of Russia and the King of Prussia—accompanied by Major-General Blücher and other military luminaries, made a state visit to England. There followed almost three weeks of festivities. In between levées, royal visits and dinners, and nightly balls, they went to Ascot races. rode in the Park, went by water to view the dockyard and arsenal at Woolwich, had degrees conferred upon them in Oxford, saw the charity children at St. Pauls, visited Chelsea Hospital, attended a boxing exhibition by the most celebrated pugilists of the day, were escorted by one hundred Yeomen of the Guard to a banquet given by the City of London at the Guildhall, attended a Grand (Military) Review in Hyde Park and finally left for Portsmouth where there was a Naval Review in their honour. Here they were joined by the Duke of Wellington who had just arrived back in England after five years spent in pursuit of Napoleon.

The sovereigns left England on 27 June. The next day, in an unprecedented ceremony, the Duke of Wellington appeared in the House of Lords for the first time since being elevated to the peerage in August 1809, where the clerks read his patents as baron and viscount, earl, marquis, and lastly as duke. Peace had formally been proclaimed on 20 June and on 7 July the Prince Regent proceeded to St Paul’s Cathedral for a thanksgiving service. He was much hissed both going and coming. Despite this, he arranged for a Grand Jubilee to be held on 1 August to mark both the peace and the centenary of the accession of King George I, founder of the Hanoverian dynasty in England. The elaborate festivities included two balloon ascents,  a ‘Naumachia’ or mini naval combat on the Serpentine in Hyde Park between an English and a French Fleet, and grand fireworks from a castle or fortress especially erected in Green Park for the purpose. After the fireworks there followed ‘the Grand Metamorphosis of the Fortress into the Temple of Concord’.

On 9 August, the Princess of Wales who had not been invited to any of these celebrations, left England for the Continent, ‘weary of the petty persecutions and slights she had to undergo’.

7 July also saw the anonymous publication of a new novel, Waverley or ‘Tis Sixty Years Since. Set during the Jacobite uprising of 1745, it proved an instant success, the first edition of one thousand copies being followed in the same year by two further editions, together comprising four thousand copies. Waverley is frequently regarded as being the first historical novel in the western tradition. It was soon rumoured to be by the Scottish poet Walter Scott, but he insisted on preserving his anonymity, publishing succeeding novels as ‘by the Author of Waverley”. Eventually, although not a series or sequels, these became known as the Waverley novels.

Another publication later that year was The Life of Napoleon, a Hudibrastic Poem by Doctor Syntax that demonised the fallen emperor in mock celebratory verses. In this illustration, a parody of Fuseli’s Nightmare, the young Napoleon dreams of future glory.

Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, the war continued with the British army reinforced by a contingent lately arrived from France. On 24 August they attacked the Americans at Bladensburg, later entering Washington, as Harry Smith recorded in his memoirs ‘for the barbarous purpose of destroying the city’. He continued, ‘Admiral Cockburn would have burnt the whole but [General] Ross would only consent to the burning of the public buildings. I have no objection to burn arsenals, dockyards, frigates, buildings, stores, barracks etc., but well do I remember that fresh from the Duke’s humane warfare in the South of France, we were horrified at the order to burn the elegant Houses of Parliament and the President’s House.’

Harry, to his great delight, was sent home with despatches, making the crossing from the Chesapeake to Spithead in only twenty-one days. It was seven years since he had set foot in England, but uppermost in his mind was the reunion with his wife, Juana, from whom he had parted the previous May.

On 24 December the Treaty of Ghent was signed, formally ending the war between the United Kingdom and the United States.  However, it took some time for the news to reach the combatting armies. On 8 January 1815, the British attacked New Orleans and were defeated, but some hostilities continued until mid-February when both sides had ratified the Treaty.