Anniversary accounts of battles for land and freedom, and Brits were exposed for the teary folk they really are
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Historical anniversaries were hard to avoid this year. Two French battlefields, Waterloo and Agincourt, were picked over again after 200 and 600 years, while other historians focused on a meadow “between Windsor and Staines” where the most famous document in English history, Magna Carta, was sealed eight centuries ago. The most original take on Napoleon’s last stand was Brian Cathcart’s account of the Waterloo Dispatch, The News from Waterloo (Faber), which reconstructs the rather haphazard fashion in which the “most complete victory that [Wellington] had ever gained” was reported to an anxious population across the Channel. Cathcart follows the news day by day, demolishing a few myths along the way – not least the one that the banker Nathan Rothschild was the first to hear of the victory. Despite the urgency of the circumstances, there is a reminder of an age to which “rolling news” was an alien concept. Wellington retired on the night of the battle, and did not begin writing his dispatch until he had snatched a few hours’ sleep, “too exhausted” even to write to the king of France before he retired.
As well as a brilliant, even-handed short study of Waterloo by Alan Forrest, the Great Battles series from Oxford University Press published an analysis of another famous French defeat, though one with rather fewer strategic consequences for the victor, in 1415. Agincourt is by the doyenne of historians of that battle, Anne Curry. Curry also co-edited (with Malcolm Mercer) the fabulously illustrated catalogue and collection of essays, The Battle of Agincourt (Yale), which accompanies the ongoing Royal Armouries exhibition at the Tower of London. She has gone deeply into the muster rolls and accounts of the dead and wounded, and is at the forefront of efforts to reinterpret the battle as a slightly less unequal contest than traditional accounts, not least Shakespeare’s, would have us believe.
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