Kirjahaku

The Duke of Wellington described the Battle of Waterloo as ‘the most desperate business I ever was in. I was never so near being beat’. The courage of British troops that day has been rightly praised ever since, but the fact that one-third of the forces which gave him his narrow victory were subjects, not of George III, but of the King of the Netherlands, has been almost completely ignored. This book seeks to correct a grave injustice through the study of Dutch sources – both primary and secondary – the majority of which have never been used by English-speaking historians.The Dutch-Belgians have been variously described as inexperienced, incompetent and cowardly, a rogue element in the otherwise disciplined Allied Army. It is only now being tentatively acknowledged that they alone saved Wellington from disaster at Quatre Bras.He had committed a strategic error in that, as Napoleon advanced, his own troops were scattered over a hundred kilometres of southern Belgium. Outnumbered three to one, the Netherlanders gave him time to concentrate his forces, and save Brussels from French occupation. At Waterloo itself, on at least three occasions when the fate of the battle ‘hung upon the cusp’ their engagement with the enemy aided British recovery. Their commander – the Prince of Orange – is viciously described as an arrogant fool, ‘a disaster waiting to happen’ and even a dangerous lunatic. According to the assessment of the Duke himself, he was a reliable and courageous subordinate.The Dutch material in this book reveals a new dimension for familiar events in the Campaign, and includes many unseen illustrations. For the first time, a full assessment is made of the challenge which Willem I faced as King of a country hastily cobbled together by the Congress of Vienna, and of his achievement in assembling, equipping and training thirty thousand men from scratch in eighteen months. This is a timely reassessment in the two hundredth anniversary year of the battle of Waterloo. The veneration which the Duke of Wellington justifiably enjoyed after the Waterloo Campaign should not be allowed to forgive his lifelong lack of acknowledgment of the debt he owed the Netherlanders. As he once said himself, ‘there should be glory enough for all’, and it is high time that they are allowed to claim their share.

The family of George II has been ill-served by history and by most historians. He was a German, the last British monarch to have been born outside of Great Britain, but by the end of his long reign the House of Hanover was firmly established as the British ruling family, while the dangerous and more legitimate claims of the Stuarts had finally been laid to rest. It has been said that he was the first British king to wield little real power, but he was the first genuinely to understand the concept of constitutional monarchy and allow his ministers to guide him, although he certainly made them suffer in the process.The family has been further neglected because the early death of his eldest son, Frederick, the Prince of Wales, meant that the succession passed to George's grandson, the familiar 'mad' George III. This, and the tendency of European royalty to use a very limited number of Christian names, has caused a genealogical 'blurring' that has erased the family of George II from the consciousness of history. To make matters worse, Frederick has usually been viewed through the distorting glass of his father's often unreasonable animosity rather than for his actual contribution. His brother, the Duke of Cumberland, has been dismissed simply as the Butcher of Culloden and his lifetime achievements overlooked. Anne, Princess Royal and Princess of Orange is the only English princess ever to rule in her own right in a foreign country but she is virtually unknown. And their four sisters are even less remembered.Royal Discord seeks to redress the balance and restore the members of this remarkable family - with their undoubted strengths and their undeniable weaknesses - to a fitting place in the pageant of not just British but European history.