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Thomas Hardy, arguably the foremost English novelist of the early twentieth century, often drew on the past for inspiration. He spent long hours in the British Museum researching accounts of the Napoleonic Wars, so as to lend an air of authenticity to the historical backdrop of his writings. Although Hardy's trademark descriptions of life in the fictitious county of Wessex are quintessentially English, they also reflect a fascination with the real-life German recruits who had left their fatherland to fight Napoleon under British colours. in contrast to a plethora of earlier Jacobite, Whig and Radical pamphleteers, he did not see the stationing of foreign mercenaries on British soil as an oppressive threat to the liberties of the English people, but rather imagined the King's German Legion (1803-16) as a benign, albeit exotic, experiment in transnational bonding. A novella in which he first developed this idea, The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion (1890), tells the story of a young woman who falls unhappily in love with a glamorous corporal of the eponymous unit, an 'ideal being … with none of the appurtenances of an ordinary house dweller'. 1 The tale of the two lovers struck a chord with newspaper publishers, who considered it commercial enough to be advertised as a 'brilliant story of the last century'. 2 The Melancholy Hussar betrayed subtle traces of the transnational cultural contact that the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815) had left behind in the British imagination. The apparent longevity of this memory and Hardy's contextualisation of his story in a literary discourse of melancholic loss interlock with historians' claims about the singular historical significance of the war experience. 3 For Reinhart Koselleck, the Revolutionary period heralded a decline of
Related papers
Transnational Affinities and Invented Traditions: The Napoleonic Wars in British and Hanoverian Memory, 1815-1915, English Historical Review 127 (2012): 1404-34. (Winner of the Royal Historical Society’s Alexander Prize)
Thomas Hardy, arguably the foremost English novelist of the early twentieth century, often drew on the past for inspiration. He spent long hours in the British Museum researching accounts of the Napoleonic Wars, so as to lend an air of authenticity to the historical backdrop of his writings. Although Hardy's trademark descriptions of life in the fictitious county of Wessex are quintessentially English, they also reflect a fascination with the real-life German recruits who had left their fatherland to fight Napoleon under British colours. in contrast to a plethora of earlier Jacobite, Whig and Radical pamphleteers, he did not see the stationing of foreign mercenaries on British soil as an oppressive threat to the liberties of the English people, but rather imagined the King's German Legion (1803-16) as a benign, albeit exotic, experiment in transnational bonding. A novella in which he first developed this idea, The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion (1890), tells the story of a young woman who falls unhappily in love with a glamorous corporal of the eponymous unit, an 'ideal being … with none of the appurtenances of an ordinary house dweller'. 1 The tale of the two lovers struck a chord with newspaper publishers, who considered it commercial enough to be advertised as a 'brilliant story of the last century'. 2 The Melancholy Hussar betrayed subtle traces of the transnational cultural contact that the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815) had left behind in the British imagination. The apparent longevity of this memory and Hardy's contextualisation of his story in a literary discourse of melancholic loss interlock with historians' claims about the singular historical significance of the war experience. 3 For Reinhart Koselleck, the Revolutionary period heralded a decline of
Transnational Affinities and Invented Traditions: The Napoleonic Wars in British and Hanoverian Memory, 1815-1915
The English Historical Review, 2012
(with Friedemann Pestel) 1814/15 – A Threshold of Post-Revolutionary Experience. Introduction, JMEH 15,2 (2017), 187-196
JMEH 15 / 2017 / 2 J o u r n a l o f M o d e r n E u r o p e a n H i s t o r y V o l . 1 5 | 2 0 1 7 / 2 T h e P o s t -R e v o l u t i o n a r y E x p e r i e n c e o f 1 8 1 4 / 1 5
Introduction
In Search of the German Revolution
2015
nouncement, Rosa Luxemburg published an article in Die Rote Fahne under the heading: 'The Beginning' in which she called for the broadening and deepening of the revolution. 'The revolution has begun', she wrote, 'Not jubilation for that achieved; not triumph over the defeated enemy are appropriate [at this time], but the toughest self-criticism and iron discipline over the energy needed to continue the work started.' 2 There were other radical voices, not least those of the Independent Socialist Emil Barth and Richard Müller, the leader of the revolutionary Greater Berlin Workers' and Soldiers' Council. These radicals had a fundamentally different vision for Germany than that of the Social Democrats and their liberal allies. They sought a thorough-going transformation of Germany's political and economic institutions that would spell the end of the capitalist era and the inauguration of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'. That a revolution of sorts had occurred was nonetheless acknowledged by contemporaries. Hermann Müller, who would twice serve as chancellor at the head of coalition governments, recounted in his memoirs published little more than a dozen years later, how on 5 November when Admiral Souchon gave up command of Kiel, a sailor's mutiny transformed into a revolution. 3 Ernst Troeltsch noted that 'revolution hung in the air' already since the winter of 1917. He was unambiguous in his verdict that in November 'the long feared and expected revolution had broken out'. But he also noted that it was over as soon as it had taken place. Writing barely three weeks after the 9 November, Troeltsch used the past tense: 'Germany had its victorious revolution as once England, America and France had'; but unlike these revolutions, Germany's had been a quiet affair, with hardly any bloodshed spilled. 4 His well-known contemporary, Harry Graf Kessler, the 'red count', also noted the brevity and muteness of the revolution. 5 By mid-November, Kessler observed what he believed to be the unrevolutionary character of the revolution: 'The first Sunday after the revolution. Late in the afternoon large crowds of walkers crossed [Unten den] Linden to the Marstall to look at the marks on the buildings left by gunfire. All were very peaceful in their petty-bourgeois curiosity […].' 6 And when he returned from Poland in mid
Writing the Revolution: German and English Radical Literature, 1819-1848/49
This study explores German and English revolutionary discourse between 1819 and 1848 / 49. This period was marked by dramatic social and economic transformations and witnessed a pronounced discursive shift from political to social revolution. Writing the Revolution engages with literary authors, radical journalists, early proletarian pamphleteers and political theorists. It traces radical demands for social liberation on the one hand, and liberal fears of the spectre of proletarian revolution on the other. The book argues that these ideological battles generated a compelling “poetics of revolution."
English Historical Review Vol. cxxVii No. 529
© The Author [2012]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1093/ehr/ces248
Transnational Affinities and Invented Traditions:
The Napoleonic Wars in British and Hanoverian
Memory, 1815–1915*
*The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of the English Historical Review,
Brendan Simms, T.c.W. Blanning, Torsten Riotte and Andreas Stucki for their helpful criticism
during the preparation of this article.
1. Thomas Hardy, The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion and Other Stories (London,
2005), p. 119; G. Harvey, Thomas Hardy (Oxford and New York, 2003), pp. 38, 115–16.
2. The Yorkshire Herald, 15 Nov. 1890, ‘A Brilliant Story of the Last century’. For an
analysis of Hardy’s readership, see T.R. Wright, Hardy and His Readers (Basingstoke, 2003),
esp. pp. 9–27.
3. i follow Kieran Klaus Patel here in defining ‘transnational’ as dialectic relationships
between two or more national societies beyond the realm of pure diplomacy: K.K. Patel,
‘Überlegungen zu einer transnationalen Geschichte’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, lii
(2004), pp. 632–3.
EHR, cxxvii. 529 (Dec. 2012)
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Thomas Hardy, arguably the foremost English novelist of the early
twentieth century, often drew on the past for inspiration. He spent long
hours in the British Museum researching accounts of the Napoleonic
Wars, so as to lend an air of authenticity to the historical backdrop
of his writings. Although Hardy’s trademark descriptions of life in
the fictitious county of Wessex are quintessentially English, they also
reflect a fascination with the real-life German recruits who had left
their fatherland to fight Napoleon under British colours. in contrast
to a plethora of earlier Jacobite, Whig and Radical pamphleteers, he
did not see the stationing of foreign mercenaries on British soil as
an oppressive threat to the liberties of the English people, but rather
imagined the King’s German Legion (1803–16) as a benign, albeit
exotic, experiment in transnational bonding. A novella in which he
first developed this idea, The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion
(1890), tells the story of a young woman who falls unhappily in love
with a glamorous corporal of the eponymous unit, an ‘ideal being …
with none of the appurtenances of an ordinary house dweller’.1 The
tale of the two lovers struck a chord with newspaper publishers, who
considered it commercial enough to be advertised as a ‘brilliant story
of the last century’.2
The Melancholy Hussar betrayed subtle traces of the transnational
cultural contact that the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars
(1792–1815) had left behind in the British imagination. The apparent
longevity of this memory and Hardy’s contextualisation of his story in
a literary discourse of melancholic loss interlock with historians’ claims
about the singular historical significance of the war experience.3 For
Reinhart Koselleck, the Revolutionary period heralded a decline of
1405
people’s ‘space of experience’ (that knowledge which could be usefully
applied from the past) in inverse relationship to the widening of their
‘horizon of expectation’ (the uncertain possibility of the not-yet).4 This
rupture in the flow of time, the literary scholar Richard Terdiman
adds, precipitated a ‘memory crisis’ that resulted in the alienation of
Europeans from their heritage, and in an obsession with recovering the
past.5 Not long ago, Peter Fritzsche went a step further by emphasising
the pervasiveness of ruptured memory in order to accentuate the
transcontinental connections formed by nostalgia across Europe and
North America.6
The literary texts and memoirs that Terdiman and Fritzsche rely on
for their arguments raise further questions about the functioning of the
social and institutional frameworks within which ideas about nostalgia, as
well as positive experiences of modernity, were articulated.7 Scholarship
in the vein of the Anglo-German collaborative research project ‘The
Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in European Experiences and
Memories’ has recently begun to explore how the complex interplay
of economic, social and mental factors influenced both popular
perceptions of the wars against France and their long-term aftermath in
collective memory.8 What remains a matter of contention is the agency
and formative power of nationalist ideologies. There is a sense, as
Fritzsche notes, that many of the alienated inhabitants of the nineteenth
century sought solace in xenophobia and turned against the intellectual
exchanges that had been characteristic of the Enlightenment.9 This claim
derives from an unspoken, intuitive rather than rational, assumption
based on the early appropriation of the anti-Napoleonic struggle by
nationalist causes outside France. The nationalisation of memory has
proved self-perpetuating in generating a privileged heuristic status for
the nation-state at the expense of alternative perspectives, as the state
of research on the battles of Leipzig (1813) and Waterloo (1815) makes
A N D H A N OV E R i A N M E M O RY, 1815 – 1915
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4. R. Koselleck, ‘Historia Magistra Vitae: The Dissolution of the Topos into the Perspective
of a Modernised Historical Process’, in id., Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, tr.
K. Tribe (cambridge, MA, 1985), pp. 21–39. On the perceived acceleration of historical time in
the nineteenth century, see also R.A. Vieira, ‘connecting the New Political History with Recent
Theories of Temporal Acceleration: Speed, Politics, and the cultural imagination in fin de siècle
Britain’, History and Theory, l (2011), pp. 373–89.
5. R. Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (ithaca, NY, 1993), p. 3.
6. P. Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History
(cambridge, MA, 2004), esp. p. 204.
7. On this point, cf. M. Levinger, ‘The Birth of Modern Memory’, Modern Intellectual History,
iii (2006), p. 177; P. Mandler, review of Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present, ante, cxxi (2006), p. 122.
8. A. Forrest, E. François, and K. Hagemann, eds., War Memories: The Revolutionary and
Napoleonic Wars in Modern European Culture (Basingstoke, 2012). For more detailed information
about the participants, publications, and conferences, see the project website at the York University
centre for Eighteenth century Studies, http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/cecs/resprojects/nbi2.htm.
Unfortunately, the German website has been taken down since the end of the project in 2009.
9. Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present, p. 129.
10. For a representative sampling, see K.A. Schäfer, ‘Die Völkerschlacht’, in E. François and
H. Schulze, eds., Deutsche Erinnerungsorte (3 vols., Munich, 2001–2), ii. 187–8; W. Siemann,
‘Krieg und Frieden in historischen Gedenkfeiern des Jahres 1913’, in D. Düding, P. Friedemann
and P. Münch, eds., Öffentliche Festkultur: Politische Feste in Deutschland von der Aufklärung
bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Reinbek, 1988), pp. 298–320; U. Schneider, Politische Festkultur im 19.
Jahrhundert: Die Rheinprovinz von der französischen Zeit bis zum Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges
(1806–1918) (Essen, 1995), pp. 52–65, 332–6; S.-L. Hoffmann, ‘Mythos und Geschichte: Leipziger
Gedenkfeiern der Völkerschlacht im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert’, in E. François, H. Siegrist
and J. Vogel, eds., Nation und Emotion: Deutschland und Frankreich im Vergleich im 19. und
20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1995), pp. 111–32; L. colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837
(New Haven and London, 1992), pp. 364–7; P. Shaw, Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination
(Basingstoke, 2002), p. 2. Although Jeremy Black gives the Waterloo commemorations of Britain’s
allies their due, his recently published reflections on the great battle nevertheless adopt an all
too familiar stance in positing that ‘Waterloo was an iconic battle for the British, a triumph of
endurance that ensured a nineteenth-century world in which Britain played the key role’: J. Black,
The Battle of Waterloo: A New History (cambridge, 2010), p. xi.
11. P.W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1996), p. v.
12. D. Blackbourn, ‘“As Dependent on Each Other as Man and Wife”: cultural contacts and
Transfers’, in D. Geppert and R. Gerwarth, eds., Wilhelmine Germany and Edwardian Britain:
Essays on Cultural Affinity (Oxford, 2008), p. 18.
13. J. Rüger, ‘Revisiting the Anglo-German Antagonism’, Journal of Modern History, lxxxiii
(2011), pp. 579–617, esp. p. 585. Rüger provides an excellent survey of the latest literature on
Anglo-German history. See also P. Major, ‘Britain and Germany: A Love-Hate Relationship?’ and
A. Fahrmeir, ‘New Perspectives in Anglo-German comparative History’, both in German History,
xxvi (2008), pp. 553–62 and 457–68. On the particularly pronounced simultaneity of cooperation
and antagonism in the field of German and British colonial politics, see U. Lindner, ‘imperialism
and Globalization: Entanglements and interactions between the British and German colonial
Empires in Africa before the First World War’, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute London,
xxxii (2010), pp. 4–28.
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T H E N A P O L E O N i c WA R S i N B R i T i S H
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clear: despite having been won by coalitions, a substantial and fairly
fresh body of publications concentrates on the two battles’ emblematic
function in German and British national mythology respectively.10
in stark contrast, diplomatic historians have long accepted the
centripetal quality of Allied coalition-building in 1813–15, which,
in the words of Paul W. Schroeder, constituted nothing less than
the turning point in the transformation of European international
politics from a ‘competitive and conflictual balance of power’ to a
more peaceful ‘nineteenth-century concert and equilibrium’.11
Moreover, the new interest in histoire croisée and cultural-transfer
analysis has generated a plethora of studies on various aspects of the
Anglo-German relationship, from immigration patterns to student
pacifism, showing that Britain and Germany were ‘less internally
coherent and more externally open-ended’ than previous work treating
the nation-state as the self-evident unit of enquiry would suggest.12
The existing literature, however, has been less successful at reconciling
the substantial evidence of cultural entanglements and good will on
the one hand with the xenophobic tendencies of post-Napoleonic
memory and the escalation of political antagonism on the other. in
the case of Britain and Germany, the key question as to why the two
nations went to war with one another in 1914 despite their various
entwinements still demands more conclusive answers.13
1407
The present article argues that the memory cultures of Britain and
Hanover shed new light on long-term dynamics of cooperation and
alienation that gave rise to these fateful dichotomies in Anglo-German
history. For 123 years (1714–1837) England had closer relations with
Hanover than with any other continental European state while the two
monarchies were ruled in personal union under the House of Guelph.
T.c.W. Blanning, Brendan Simms and a small cohort of younger
historians have uncovered many important aspects of the diplomatic,
religious, scientific, economic and cultural links that emerged from
what was initially a dynastic marriage of convenience, but as yet we
know little about the afterlife of this bilateral heritage.14 Such reticence
belies the richness of Anglo-Hanoverian dialogue in the realm of
memory, and, more particularly, the ways in which transnational
remembrance shaped the two societies even after the formal dissolution
of the personal union with the death in 1837 of the last male monarch
to inherit both crowns, William iV. it will be seen that their close
collaboration in the wars against Napoleon conditioned not only how
Britons and Hanoverians related to each other but also their respective
histories. Rather than being mutually exclusive, internationalism and
nationalism both moulded the process of historical remembrance well
into the First World War.
To make sense of these developments and their ultimately alienating
effect on Anglo-Hanoverian relations, Jan and Aleida Assmann’s
distinction between ‘communicative’ and ‘cultural’ memory offers a
useful starting point. The former concept designates the living, embodied
memory of social groups with first-hand knowledge of certain historic
events. The Anglo-Hanoverian veterans of the duke of Wellington’s army
and their dependants partook of the same communicative memory for
as long as the immediacy of the Napoleonic war experiences remained
vibrant. When these personal networks faded away with the passing
of their members, Waterloo entered the domain of cultural memory,
an abstract mode of commemoration more reliant on mediation
through official rituals and symbols that were liable to semantic
change. This is not to say that the transition from one ontological
state to the other was predetermined, because any attempt to apply
Jan and Aleida Assmann’s binary model in a schematic fashion would
A N D H A N OV E R i A N M E M O RY, 1815 – 1915
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14. T.c.W. Blanning, ‘“That Horrid Electorate” or “Ma patrie germanique”? George iii,
Hanover and the Fürstenbund of 1785’, The Historical Journal, xx (1977), pp. 311–44; B. Simms,
Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714–1783 (London,
2007); N.B. Harding, Hanover and the British Empire, 1700–1837 (Woodbridge, 2007); T. Riotte,
Hannover in der britischen Politik (1792–1815) (Münster, 2005); A.c. Thompson, Britain, Hanover
and the Protestant Interest, 1688–1756 (Woodbridge, 2006); H. Smith, Georgian Monarchy:
Politics and Culture, 1714–1760 (cambridge, 2006); P.H.H. Draeger, ‘Great Britain and Hanover,
1830–66’, (Univ. of cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1998). For an overview of recent scholarship on
Anglo-Hanoverian relations, see B. Simms and T. Riotte, eds., The Hanoverian Dimension in
British History, 1714–1837 (cambridge, 2007).
i
The military hostilities that broke out between Revolutionary France
and ancien régime Europe have recently been termed the first total war
15. Since i use Jan and Aleida Assmann’s two memory categories only in a very broad sense,
it would go too far to elaborate on their theoretical intricacies and the transformative effect
that their work has had on memory studies. See J. Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift,
Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich, 1992); A. Assmann,
Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (Munich, 1999);
A. Erll, Kollektives Gedächtnis und Erinnerungskulturen (Stuttgart, 2005), pp. 27–33, 112–18;
G. Sebald and J. Weyand, ‘Zur Formierung sozialer Gedächtnisse’, Zeitschrift für Soziologie, xv
(2011), pp. 174–89.
16. W.R. Röhrbein, ‘Zusammenfassung—oder: Was blieb von der Personalunion?’, in id. and
A. von Rohr, eds., Hannover im Glanz und Schatten des britischen Weltreiches (Hannover, 1977), p. 86.
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risk distorting the complex dialectic between strategic forgetting and
preservation that defined Anglo-Hanoverian memory. Yet introducing
communicative and cultural memory loosely as overarching analytical
categories helps to focus attention on some of the varied issues that
this article addresses.15 The first part engages with the development
of an Anglo-Hanoverian social space against the background of the
two countries’ political relationship in the first half of the nineteenth
century. The second section expands on this social theme by examining
more closely manifestations of an Anglo-Hanoverian communicative
memory in charities for war victims and the collaboration of veterans
in claiming public recognition for their wartime service. The third
and longest section endeavours to account for the profoundness of
Anglo-Hanoverian estrangement that nevertheless came to characterise
both societies’ attitudes to their military heritage in the second half of
the nineteenth century, as demonstrated by debates in Britain about
foreign enlistment during the crimean War (1854–6) and Hanoverian
responses to the reinvention of Prussian army traditions during the
reign of Kaiser Wilhelm ii (1889–1918).
in 1977, when the historian Waldemar Röhrbein first suggested the
need for further research into the perpetuation of Anglo-Hanoverian
cultural crossovers after the personal union, such an undertaking would
have represented a Sisyphean and arbitrary task, given the wide dispersal
of potential sources.16 As a consequence of the digitisation of archive
catalogues and newspapers, it has now become possible to explore large
amounts of data for relevant keywords with a speed that would have
been unthinkable thirty-five years ago. A special debt is owed here to
The Times online archive and the ever-expanding print-media holdings
of the British Library that are being made accessible online. Read in
combination with parliamentary debates, memoirs and secondary
literature, they promise a richer understanding of the transnational
legacy of the Napoleonic Wars in Britain and Germany.
1409
because of the unprecedented intensification of warfare after 1792.17
Although the electorate of Hanover was located geographically outside
the immediate zone of danger, the perpetual campaigns that followed
eventually caught up with Britain’s continental dependency. When the
armies of Napoleon did arrive, the anglophile German principality was
made to feel the full impact of the First consul’s bid for hegemony
on the continent. A French invasion under the command of General
Edouard Mortier in May 1803 secured the disbandment of the entire
electoral army in the convention of Artlenburg, and set in motion
the flight of large numbers of disgruntled Hanoverians across the
channel. The British government supported the exodus materially,
since it welcomed volunteers for the war effort against Napoleon. The
30,000 former soldiers, escaped draft-dodgers and prisoners of war who
passed into the so-called King’s German Legion (KGL) over the next
twelve years won fame for their military achievements as well as iconic
status in later narratives of the Napoleonic Wars.18 in 1910, the amateur
historian Adolf Pfannkuche stressed proudly in a popular history of the
KGL that the ‘feats of the Legion are what raised us from the ashes of
an epoch of humiliation’. While he and many of his contemporaries
looked with regret on Hanover’s ‘fateful’ bondage to British diplomacy,
he also had nothing but praise for Britain as a ‘paragon of national
liberty, a solid rock in the sea on which Hanoverians sought and found
sanctuary’.19
ironically, at the time of the KGL’s inception, opposition politicians
in Britain painted King George iii’s subjects from the continent as a
royalist Praetorian Guard with ambitions to overthrow that national
liberty. in making these accusations, they resuscitated old fears dating
back to 1742, 1756 and 1775, when Hanoverian troops had last been
hired. The clash between legionnaires and irish militiamen at Tullamore
(1806), followed by the participation of Hanoverian troops in the
flogging of militiamen protesting about the price of knapsacks in the
cambridgeshire town of Ely in 1809, could not but fan the rhetorical
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17. D.A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It
(Boston, MA, 2007), esp. p. 9. For stimulating discussions about the applicability of the concept
to Revolutionary and Napoleonic warfare, see also R. chickering and S. Förster, eds., War in an
Age of Revolution, 1775–1815 (cambridge, 2010).
18. The particulars of recruitment to the KGL have been so thoroughly explored that i will
refrain from further discussion. For details, see J. Mastnak, ‘Werbung und Ersatzwesen der
Königlich Deutschen Legion 1803 bis 1813’, Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift, lx (2001), pp. 119–42;
D.S. Gray, ‘The Services of the King’s German Legion in the Army of the Duke of Wellington,
1809–1815’ (Florida State Univ. Ph.D thesis, 1970), pp. 1–77.
19. A. Pfannkuche, Die königl. Deutsche Legion (King’s German Legion) 1803–1816 (Hannover,
1910), pp. 264–5.
20. N.B. Harding, ‘Hanover and British Republicanism’, in Simms and Riotte, eds., The
Hanoverian Dimension in British History, p. 322. it appears, however, that the irish militia started
the altercation at Tullamore. Pro-German voices seized on this redeeming detail to exonerate
the KGL after the Napoleonic Wars. cf. D.S. Gray, ‘“A Gross Violation of the Publick Peace”:
The Tullamore incident, 1806’, Irish Sword: Journal of the Military History Society of Ireland, xii
(1976), pp. 298–301; ‘History of the King’s German Legion’, Athenaeum, cclx (1832), p. 675. On
the hiring of Hanoverian mercenaries in the eighteenth century, see Simms, Three Victories and
a Defeat, pp. 595–6, 609.
21. Harding, ‘Hanover and British Republicanism’, p. 320; Morning Chronicle, 17 Nov. 1817,
‘To the Editor’; Harding, Hanover and the British Empire, p. 256.
22. Many of the KGL’s field officers were familiar with the British army through their
service in Gibraltar and india in the 1780s and 1790s, but, as chen Tzoref-Ashkenazi has shown
recently, Hanoverians maintained a cultural separateness from the British colonial establishment.
The intensifying anglicisation of the Hanoverians after 1803 found outward expression in the
introduction of English as the language of command: c. Tzoref-Ashkenazi, ‘Hanoverians,
Germans, and Europeans: colonial identity in Early British india’, Central European History,
xliii (2010), pp. 221–38. On Ludger Pries’ definition of transnational space as constituted by social
practices, see ‘The approach of transnational social spaces: responding to new configurations
of the social and the spatial’, in L. Pries, ed., New Transnational Social Spaces: International
Migration and Transnational Companies in the Early Twenty-First Century (London and New
York, 2001), p. 18.
23. A. Uffindell and M. corum, On the Fields of Glory: The Battlefields of the 1815 Campaign
(London, 1996), pp. 328–9.
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fire of Radicals such as William cobbett.20 Because of such expressions
of visceral opposition to the presence of the KGL in Britain, in addition
to accusations of the preferential treatment that they received at the
expense of native forces, the more upbeat histories of the unit—such as
that of Pfannkuche—have attracted censure for being too nostalgic.21
it is argued here, by contrast, that the negative stereotyping of
Hanoverians ignored the reconciliatory counter-pull of the ‘transnational
social space’ (to borrow a term coined by Ludger Pries) that the
legionnaires managed to carve out for themselves in English society.
This comprised social practices, artefacts and symbols far exceeding
any previous Anglo-Hanoverian interactions, which is precisely why
republican Radicals were slow to make acknowledgements that could
have been construed as retrospective approval for the 1804 Foreign
Enlistment Act of the Tories.22 in fact, the size of the emigrant legion,
and the infrastructural investments needed for its accommodation,
irrevocably changed the character of the local communities that hosted
the recruits. Bexhill, a town of a mere 1,000 inhabitants in south-east
England, saw its population expand nearly threefold in August 1804
with the arrival of four KGL infantry battalions. Although residents
gave the foreigners a cool reception, the parish of St Peter’s had already
begun recording the first weddings by the end of the month. Regular
bi-national social functions, and memorable traits of the Germans
such as their fine singing and love of horses, did not fail to make an
impression on the town’s population, and notably its women, no fewer
than 108 of whom entered into marriage with legionnaires before the
KGL left Bexhill in August 1814.23
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The British army on campaign had occasion to deepen these bilateral
encounters. Hanoverians participated in a range of far-flung missions
in collaboration with ethnically British units; at Waterloo alone KGL
regiments were dispersed among three separate army corps, while a
relatively significant number of officers went on to obtain transfer into
the British service proper by exchange or promotion.24 Evidence of
benign ‘otherness’ impressed comrades of the other nationality all the
more deeply on those occasions when it broke through the emotional
desensitisation caused by the horrors of war to which armies were
exposed on campaign. captain cavalié Mercer of the Royal Horse
Artillery, whose memoirs remain one of the most detailed and lively
eye-witness accounts of the 1815 campaign, observed: ‘Affection for, and
care of, his horse, is the trait, par excellence, which distinguishes the
German dragoon from the English.’ Significantly, the adoption of KGL
cavalry training manuals served as a call for imitation of Hanoverian
horsemanship, as did the perpetuation of more anecdotal evidence in
autobiographies and newspapers.25 At the height of chartist unrest,
the Tory journal, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, reflected on the
discipline of the legionnaires in 1838:
A N D H A N OV E R i A N M E M O RY, 1815 – 1915
Admiration for certain Hanoverian traits complemented rather than
contradicted British national pride. The author of the above lines
supported cultural borrowing as a means to aid Providence in ‘exalting
England’ above all other powers.
For similar reasons, Britain’s German allies featured more prominently in
popular commemorations of Waterloo than some modern historians seem
24. Of a total of 1,350 KGL officers, 44 from the infantry and cavalry entered the British service
in this way. Presumably this figure would have been higher still had promotion in the British army
been by merit or seniority rather than purchase, which few Hanoverians could afford. in the KGL,
advancement took place by the former method. N. Ludlow Beamish, History of the King’s German
Legion (2 vols., London, 1832–7), ii. 629–31, 669–71.
25. cavalié Mercer, Journal of the Waterloo Campaign Kept throughout the Campaign of
1815 (1870; London, 1927), p. 42. cf. Chums, 17 Oct. 1894, ‘The Pets of the Regiments’; F. von
Arentsschildt, Instructions for Officers and Non-commissioned Officers of Cavalry on Outpost
Duty, abr. F. Ponsonby (London, 1844).
26. ‘The King’s German Legion’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, xliii (1838), pp. 739, 743.
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[The KGL’s] general character and conduct had no slight influence on the
British soldiery. The remarkable propriety of conduct exhibited by the
Germans in general, whether under arms or off duty, their love of music,
their freedom from riot or intoxication, their scientific knowledge, in a
great many instances, of the more profound parts of their profession, and
the striking skill, and even the perfection with which they performed the
duties of parade and field days, were felt by the British as an example from
which much was to be learned, and from which, when the first aversion of
John Bull to all foreigners was got over, the national good sense learned a
great deal.26
27. cf. D.H. Williams, Waterloo: New Perspectives. The Great Battle Reappraised (New York,
1993), p. 11; P. Hofschröer, 1815—The Waterloo Campaign: The German Victory. From Waterloo to
the Fall of Napoleon (London, 1999), pp. 336–8.
28. The Preston Guardian, 22 June 1850, ‘Anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo’; D. Hunt,
A History of Preston (Preston, 1992), pp. 193–4, 97–8. Most newspapers tended to provide only
sparing descriptions of Waterloo anniversaries, but it is notable that in cosmopolitan Manchester,
too, the municipal Waterloo dinner of 1849 displayed the flags of the Dutch-German allies at
one end of the banquet hall: Manchester Times, 16 June 1849. For contemporary comparisons of
Marlborough and Wellington as managers of coalitions, see ‘Marlborough No. ii’, Blackwood’s
Edinburgh Magazine, lviii (1845), p. 658; ‘Eugene, Marlborough, Frederick, Napoleon, and
Wellington’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, lxi (1847), pp. 45–6.
29. Colburn’s United Service Magazine, 1855, Part 1, p. 111.
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prepared to admit. ‘Revisionists’ such as David Hamilton-Williams and
Peter Hofschröer have tried to debunk the myth of a British victory
by contending that British accounts in general, and Wellington’s
in particular, deliberately ignored the pivotal input of non-British
forces.27 The festivities held to mark the thirty-fifth anniversary of the
battle in the Lancashire town of Preston, on the other hand, indicate
that the Germans formed part of an inclusive, one may go so far as
to say grateful, commemorative discourse at the local level. Following
established custom, the mayor hosted a lavish dinner for veterans of
the Napoleonic Wars and resident notables in the corn Exchange.
Unsurprisingly, the toastmasters used the occasion to extol the gallantry
of the British forces, but, more surprisingly, they also acknowledged the
relatively small number of Britons present at Waterloo and praised the
other national contingents. This was done to throw into even greater
relief Wellington’s outstanding deployment of a multinational coalition
that comprised raw new levies from Belgium, Brunswick, Hanover,
Nassau and the Netherlands. The effect was to suggest parallels with
great generals of the preceding century, such as Eugene of Savoy and
the duke of Marlborough, whose reputations derived in part from
their successful management of coalition armies and the fame they had
won not just nationally but throughout Europe. The glorification of
Wellington notwithstanding, toasts to the KGL’s ‘gallant’ defence of
La Haye Sainte and the Prussian army’s ‘great service to the British
troops’ conveyed an implicit admission that victory had indeed been
a close-run thing. if Waterloo anniversaries in Preston’s conservative
circles showed any unique traits, it was in the elaborate way in which
the prosperous citizens of this industrialising hub of cotton production
celebrated the day.28 As one contributor to the United Service Magazine
noted eloquently, ‘[f ]or ages the Germans fought in the cause and
service of England on many a glorious field, and the gallant legions of
Hanover, till lately our own, have especially distinguished themselves
under the British flag. Their reminiscences of victory are the same
as ours, and their part in them was to the full as honourable and as
glorious.’29
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To be sure, there were variations in the degree to which writers and
anniversary celebrants acknowledged Britain’s debt to foreign soldiers—
Hanoverians certainly tended to be praised more than Blücher’s Prussians,
because of their service under Wellington’s command—but the court and
keen observers of continental politics knew better than to marginalise the
role that German troops had played in the victory over Napoleon. On the
contrary, given Britain’s limited military resources on land, excessive selfadulation posed the risk in their eyes of lulling Britons into a false sense
of security and alienating former and potential future allies. However
prejudicial this was to national self-esteem, the high-society newspaper
The Morning Post nevertheless admonished its readers, just as the AngloHanoverian personal union was breaking up in June 1837, that the public
needed to learn the ‘wholesome truth’ about the dependence of the British
isles on faithful auxiliaries, and consequently the importance of ‘keeping
up that intimate connection’ with Hanover ‘so long as the frail and
perishable nature of all human alliances will permit’.30
The Hanoverian authorities had long laid the groundwork for such
overtures from London by preserving a bilateral space of memory in
official commemorations of the Napoleonic Wars. The name for the site
of Napoleon’s final defeat was a telling indicator, as Hanoverians adopted
the British ‘Waterloo’ rather than the Prussian ‘Belle Alliance’. The
popularisation of the term ‘Waterloo’ was expressive of a commitment
to the British viewpoint for political as well as cultural reasons. Whereas
the Peace column constructed on Belle-Alliance Platz in Berlin in 1840
reflected the dichotomous contextualisation of the ‘Wars of Liberation’
(1813–15) in Prussia by drawing on both monarchical and bourgeois
allegory, the use of ‘Waterloo’ reflected an unambiguous loyalty to the
ruling house.31 Financed by voluntary subscription and the Hanoverian
diet to generate a semblance of popular endorsement, a small group of
courtiers oversaw the construction of the so-called Waterloo column (1816–
32) in Hannover to pay homage and curry favour with their sovereign.32
The monument celebrated ‘courage and fidelity to king and fatherland’
by semiotically branding the names of all Waterloo casualties with the
Guelph coat of arms under a statue of Victory. What added a special twist
to this exercise in monarchical legitimation was the fact that the dual royal
titles of the dynasty were reflected at the dedication ceremony. Hanoverian
soldiers visually affirmed the existence of the personal union by wearing
scarlet tunics reminiscent of British uniforms, and by singing ‘God save
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30. Morning Post, 21 June 1837, p. 6, ‘The Kingdom of Hanover’.
31. U. Bischoff, Denkmäler der Befreiungskriege in Deutschland 1813–1815 (2 vols., Berlin,
1977), ii. 111–35; M. Lurz, Kriegerdenkmäler in Deutschland: Befreiungskriege (6 vols., Heidelberg,
1985–7), i. 222–4. On Prussian memory, see c. clark, ‘The Wars of Liberation in Prussian
Memory: Reflections on the Memorialization of War in Early Nineteenth-century Germany’,
Journal of Modern History, lxviii (1996), p. 552.
32. Since both the kingdom and the capital shared the same name, spelling is used to distinguish
them. ‘Hannover’ designates the city.
33. Bischoff, Denkmäler der Befreiungskriege, ii. 570–72. See also M. Bresemann, ‘Des Königs
Deutsche Legion 1803–1816 und ihre Überlieferung in der königlich hannoverschen Armee bis
1866’, Zeitschrift für Heereskunde, xlix (1985), pp. 102–7.
34. cited in B. Schwertfeger, Peninsula–Waterloo: Zum Gedächtnis der Königlich Deutschen
Legion (Hannover, 1914), p. 9.
35. See the open letter from the Hanoverian Zeitung für Norddeutschland to the secretary of the
Royal commission Patriotic Fund, 13 Jan. 1855, reprinted in Colburn’s United Service Magazine,
1855, Part 1, p. 276. cf. the report from John Duncan Bligh to the earl of clarendon, 23 May 1854,
reprinted in M. Mösslang, c. Manias and T. Riotte, eds., British Envoys to Germany, 1816–1866 (4
vols., cambridge, 2000–2010), iv. 230–32.
36. Adolphus Slade, Travels in Germany and Russia: Including a Steam Voyage by the Danube
and the Euxine from Vienna to Constantinople, in 1838–39 (London, 1840), p. 37.
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the King’. Afterwards the officers attended a dinner in a banquet hall that
was decorated with the twin portraits of Wellington and the former field
commander of the KGL, General count carl von Alten.33
Despite its elitist and military overtones, the anglicisation of
Hanoverian identity also influenced bourgeois mainstream patriotism,
where it acquired progressive political overtones. At the laying of
the foundation stone for the national Hermann Monument in 1841,
the delegation from Hanover affixed a commemorative plaque that
acknowledged Britain’s protection of persecuted patriots: ‘To the
King’s German Legion, hero-brethren … who, under Britain’s colours,
demonstrated German loyalty to their king and preserved the honour
of his army for the fatherland.’34 Although it was damaging, the way
in which British public opinion sided with Denmark rather than the
German confederation in the First Schleswig-Holstein War (1848–
50) left Hanoverian liberals’ faith in the fundamental benevolence of
British foreign policy and in the commonality of Anglo-Hanoverian
interests intact. London remained a useful ally against the conservative
momentum emanating from the rulers of Russia, Prussia and Austria.
Notables and middle-class entrepreneurs active in the German national
movement therefore sought to counteract Russophile sympathies in
their own country by raising donations during the crimean War for
Britain’s ‘cause of justice and civilization’ against Russia.35
Hanoverian support for British military operations in the crimea
bore witness also to the intertwined evolution of Hanoverian and British
memory even after the formal termination of the personal union. The
British naval officer and travel writer Adolphus Slade, who passed
through Hannover a couple of years after that event, was struck by
ample proof of the Hanoverian army being ‘essentially English in tone
and feeling, and from its noble services under the Duke [of Wellington]
[it] almost considers itself as still forming part of the British army’.36
Stressing the historical connection with Albion allowed Hanoverian
patriots to emphasise their own ancestors’ sacrifices for the liberation
of Germany from Napoleonic tyranny. They saw the attachment of the
KGL to Wellington’s forces as doubly liberating, because not only did this
partnership secure military victory but it also acculturated the legionnaires
1415
to the ‘liberal social customs’ and the ‘grand constitutional state-system’
of England, according to the early twentieth-century KGL historian
Pfannkuche.37 Even allowing for the fact that cultural transfer sometimes
represented less a voluntary choice than a precondition for Hanoverian
officers’ survival in polite English society, Pfannkuche’s assessment came
very close to the image that veterans projected of themselves.38 The son
and biographer of the KGL artillery commander, General Sir Julius
(von) Hartmann, reminisced that his father had combined in himself
‘the self-confidence of a scion of a Hanoverian civil service family and an
English gentleman’.39 The career of the Jäger officer Schütz von Brandis
underscored how intergenerational communication similarly moulded
popular knowledge about the Napoleonic Wars in other families. Born
into a military dynasty with ties to the KGL in 1826, he left the Hanoverian
service in 1854 to volunteer for the short-lived British German Legion in
the crimean War, before returning to his fatherland and taking part in the
battle of Langensalza, eventually resigning his commission not long after
the Prussian annexation of Hanover. in retirement, he wrote a history of
the KGL that described in great detail the gentlemanly code of British
officers and its centrality to the esprit de corps of their Hanoverian brethren.
Brandis’ views were representative of a predominantly aristocratic segment
of society, whose pride in the army was only matched by their ingrained
mistrust of Prussia.40
For these Anglophiles, playing the English card was above all a
political and psychological ploy to keep Prussification at bay. Since the
seventeenth century, Guelphs and Hohenzollerns had led an uneasy
coexistence, fighting with or against each other as the international
political situation demanded. Hanoverian ‘particularists’ never quite
forgave Prussia for the temporary annexation of the then electorate
in 1805 and hoped, instinctively, that the old ally Britain would again
protect or at any rate not betray them in a political crisis.41 On the
A N D H A N OV E R i A N M E M O RY, 1815 – 1915
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37. Pfannkuche, Die königl. deutsche Legion, p. 265.
38. Friedrich von der Decken, one of the founding fathers of the KGL, complained that upperclass Germans in London quickly had to adopt English dress and social conventions to offset ‘the
lack of patience for things foreign among Britons’: Friedrich von der Decken, Versuch über den
englischen National-Charackter (2nd edn., Hannover, 1817), p. 276.
39. Julius von Hartmann, Der Königlich Hannoversche General Sir Julius von Hartmann: Eine
Lebensskizze (Hannover, 1858), p. 188. Hartmann was not the only senior Hanoverian officer to be
characterised in this way. carl von Alten’s biographer Julius Runnebaum similarly described the
KGL field commander as the ideal of an ‘Anglo-Hanoverian gentleman’: J. Runnebaum, General
Graf Carl von Alten: Ein Soldat Europas (Hildesheim, 1964), p. 122.
40. Schütz von Brandis, Übersicht der Geschichte der Hannoverschen Armee von 1617–1866, ed.
J. von Reitzenstein (Hannover and Leipzig, 1903). Biographical details of the author are contained
in the preface.
41. G. Bartels, Preußen im Urteil Hannovers 1815–1851 (Hildesheim, 1960), pp. 109–11;
D. Brosius, ‘Hannover und Preußen vor 1866’, in R. Sabelleck, ed., Hannovers Übergang vom
Königreich zur preußischen Provinz (Hannover, 1995), pp. 23–30; F. Köster, Hannover und die
Grundlegung der preußischen Suprematie in Deutschland 1862–1864 (Hildesheim, 1978). On the
Prussian reasons for the annexation in 1805, see B. Simms, The Impact of Napoleon: Prussian High
Politics, Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Executive, 1797–1806 (cambridge, 1997), pp. 280–85.
ii
The self-perpetuating references to the past in Anglo-Hanoverian
relations that were made into the 1860s touch on an important but
under-appreciated facet of post-Napoleonic collective memory. Several
historians have contended that the strategies that European societies
adopted in response to the human cost of war consisted of abstraction
and anonymisation. They point to the phenomenon that few fallen
soldiers, except officers, were given individual grave-markers, which
reduced the nineteenth-century mourning process to one of ‘complete
individual dissolution’.45 The Achilles heel of this interpretation is not
so much that it fails to account for instances of individual mourning,
such as the listing of battle casualties on the Waterloo column, but
42. ‘Ein Bremenser’, Die Teilnahme der Herzogthümer Bremen und Verden an der deutschen
Erhebung gegen die Franzosenherrschaft und namentlich an der Schlacht von Waterloo: Eine
Festschrift zur Feier des 18. Juni (Hannover, 1865), p. 4.
43. J. Heinzen, ‘The Guelph “conspiracy”: Hanover as Would-Be intermediary in the
European System, 1866–1870’, International History Review, xxix (2007), p. 265.
44. [Heinrich Langwerth von Simmern], Der Hannöverische Particularismus: Eine oratio pro
domo (Mannheim, 1867), pp. 9–14.
45. T.W. Laqueur, ‘Memory and Naming in the Great War’, in J.R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations:
The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, NJ, 1994), p. 151. cf. G.L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers:
Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford, 1990), pp. 45–7; D.W. Lloyd, Battlefield
Tourism: Pilgrimages and the Commemoration of the Great War in Britain, Australia and Canada,
1919–1939 (Oxford, 1998), p. 21.
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fiftieth anniversary of the battle of Waterloo, amid the portents of an
imminent Prusso-Austrian showdown in Germany, an anonymous
pamphleteer reminded his readers: ‘The shared royal house nurtured a
feeling of kinship, which is still felt notably in [the duchy of ] Bremen,
where maritime trade has kept [this notion] alive among the people.
Even now the populace would not be able to believe that the English …
would ever side against us in a general war.’42 When conflict did break
out one year later, the prediction about Britain’s good intentions proved
to be accurate, although there was little Whitehall could do to prevent
the dethronement of Queen Victoria’s hapless cousin, King Georg V,
at the hands of Otto von Bismarck. Nevertheless it is testament to
the endurance of the ideals embodied by the KGL that Hanoverian
émigrés opted to form the first of two exile legions for the liberation of
the fatherland in London, and that the daughter of the KGL’s former
colonel-in-chief, the duke of cambridge, secretly agreed to help them
find work in the United Kingdom.43 The particularist politician and
grandson of a KGL general, Heinrich Langwerth von Simmern, lent
his influential voice to the recruitment drive by imploring fellow
Hanoverians not to deny their innate British ‘life essence’ at a time
when the fatherland was in danger.44
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rather that the evidence is restricted to war memorials. Other popular
mechanisms for coming to terms with the death or maiming of soldiers,
and especially a mnemonic dialogue founded on charity between the
former allies, are thereby sidelined. The next section will explore that
part of the bilateral social space in which Britons and Hanoverians
remembered the trials of war together.
Philanthropy, as Eliza Renee Milkes has demonstrated in a study
of the voluntary subscriptions to the Waterloo Fund after 1815,
was central to the commemoration in Britain of the victory over
Napoleon. The subscription sermons delivered by sympathetic clergy
reminded readers of the suffering amid the triumph, and encouraged
non-combatants to redeem their feelings of guilt for having escaped death
through donations. The Waterloo Fund dispensed the funds collected
in this manner among disabled veterans and the poor widows of fallen
soldiers to whom state pensions were not available.46 Philanthropists’
consideration for the plight of women mirrored the success of wartime
writers such as Anne Hunter, isabella Lickbarrow, Mary Leadbeater
and Amelia Opie in promoting a distinctly female perspective on the
misery inflicted upon soldiers’ families. Destitute war widows appealed
to Georgian sensibilities doubly, because their vulnerability to material
poverty and gendered sensitivity were considered to make the loss of
loved ones all the harder for them to bear.47 King George iii instructed
the Treasury to make no distinction between the widows of British and
foreign officers in the disbursement of pensions. The press followed the
example of the government by investing the financial and emotional
vulnerabilities of Hanoverian women with the aura of the familiar.48
Taking their cue from metropolitan news outlets, provincial broadsides
such as the Newcastle Courant and Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post
reported in late 1828 the story of a KGL officer’s widow and her three
young children who had been compelled by poverty to apply for parish
relief from the authorities of St George’s in London. The circumstances
of the ‘unhappy lady’ were not newsworthy for their exoticism but
rather because they amounted to another ‘of those painful instances
of destitution that present themselves so frequently of late’.49 The
German widows of other deceased officers were particularly inclined
to play on these sentiments when applying to the Waterloo committee
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46. E.R. Milkes, ‘A Battle’s Legacy: Waterloo in Nineteenth-century Britain’ (Yale Univ. Ph.D
thesis, 2002), p. 203.
47. S.c. Behrendt, ‘“A Few Harmless Numbers”: British Women Poets and the climate of War,
1793–1815’, in P. Shaw, ed., Romantic Wars: Studies in Culture and Conflict, 1793–1822 (Aldershot,
2000), p. 14. c. Kennedy, ‘From the Ballroom to the Battlefield: British Women and Waterloo’,
in A. Forrest, K. Hagemann and J. Rendall, eds., Soldiers, Citizens and Civilians: Experiences
and Perceptions of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1790–1820 (Basingstoke, 2009), p. 145.
48. British Library, Peel Papers, Additional MS 40414, fos. 336–7, War Office memorandum
concerning grant of pensions, 17 Feb. 1835.
49. The Newcastle Courant, 27 Dec. 1828, ‘Reverse of Fortune’. See also the reprint of the same
article in Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post or Plymouth and Cornish Advertiser, 15 Jan. 1829.
50. Milkes, ‘A Battle’s Legacy’, p. 196.
51. ibid., p. 185; Morning Post, 18 June 1818, p. 2, ‘Waterloo Subscription’.
52. N. Ludlow Beamish, Geschichte der Königlich Deutschen Legion (2 vols., Hannover, 1837),
ii. 526; c. Haase, Das Hannoversche Militair-Pensionswesen (Hannover, 1854), p. 86.
53. G. Schneider, ‘…nicht umsonst gefallen’? Kriegerdenkmäler und Kriegstotenkult in
Hannover (Hannover, 1991), pp. 33–5.
54. Haase, Das Hannoversche Militair-Pensionswesen, p. 103.
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for relief—as late as 1838/9, when the Waterloo Fund reverted to
the Treasury, two of the three highest-paid annuitants resided in the
kingdom of Hanover.50
charity, however, did even more to bring British generosity to the
notice of the Hanoverian lower classes. in the autumn of 1815 the
managers of the Waterloo Fund contributed £45,000 in the ‘Name
of the People of the British Empire’ to subscriptions raised for the
wounded troops of Brunswick, Hanover, Prussia and the Netherlands
in their own countries. This donation supplemented £62,500 sent to
the continent by the Westminster Waterloo Association some months
earlier. With their munificence towards Germany, the royal princes and
titled aristocrats in the Westminster Waterloo Association consciously
recognised the ties of the royal family to that country.51 The size of
the combined donations greatly exceeded what civic initiatives for
destitute veterans in war-damaged Hanover could muster. By way of
comparison, the King’s German Legion Relief Fund, which officers set
up in 1819 for the benefit of their comrades from the ranks, paid out
just £10,500 until 1836, and by 1854 funds were running so low that
the Hanoverian state parliament, the Ständeversammlung, had to step
in.52 The government scarcely performed better. According to Gerhard
Schneider, the top priority of the newly restored Guelph administration
in Hanover was economic reconstruction rather than the provision
of individual relief for needy veterans and their dependants. in this
way, the blind spots of the social infrastructure in Hanover and the
eagerness of British philanthropists to alleviate war-induced poverty
came to complement each other harmoniously—so much so that
Hanoverian officials received instructions in 1823 to stop prospective
supplicants from embarking for London.53 The crown transferred fiscal
responsibility for most invalided veterans to the Hanoverian military
treasury in 1837, but Whitehall’s continued disbursement of half-pay to
KGL officers and pensions to the disabled survivors of late eighteenthcentury campaigns remained one of the more idiosyncratic legacies of
the personal union.54
The unilinear flow of these philanthropic transactions begs the
larger question as to how far the Napoleonic Wars reinforced a British
sense of sociocultural superiority over the continent. Undoubtedly,
one important motivation for thinking about conditions in Hanover
was pity for those not lucky enough to have been born Englishmen.
Even writers as favourably disposed to Hanoverians as the Blackwood’s
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contributor cited earlier felt, ultimately, that ‘while the humblest
colony of England was gaining yearly in opulence, population and
power, Hanover continued in the same degree of moral sterility to
which it has been so largely condemned by nature’.55 General Friedrich
von der Decken, one of the early recruiters for the KGL, countered
from the vantage point of an outsider looking in on British society:
‘National pride is a mighty engine that drives the actions of Britons;
no nation ever possessed a more intense feeling of self-worth than
these islanders.’56 On the other hand, refugees from the continent
would not have won the kind of acceptance that they did without the
benefit of countervailing forces acting against supremacist thinking in
British society. Refuting Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism, David
cannadine has recently resurrected an idea first developed in the
writings of Joseph Schumpeter by claiming that the core paradigm of
British national ideology during the phase of colonial expansion in the
nineteenth century was not ethnic difference but ‘class’. Read in this way,
the interactions of Britons with other societies involved the negotiation
of status similarities and the deliberate cultivation of affinities with
élites in the extra-metropolitan world, as opposed to the insistence on
collective dissimilarities.57 Although cannadine’s attempt to establish
the primacy of horizontal dialogue across social hierarchies has been
criticised for underestimating the continuing impact of race in modern
British society (and other conflictual relations of identity), a class-based
approach nonetheless goes a long way towards conceptualising AngloHanoverian cultural exchange.58 if anything, racial affinities based on
the belief in a common Saxon heritage enhanced Hanoverian officers’
acceptance in Britain, as long as the latter observed similar standards
of professionalism and social etiquette, and the Protestant articles of
faith.59
The opportunities provided by this perceived similarity were
demonstrated by the steady advancement of the abler aristocratic
émigrés, including carl von Alten, his brother Victor, Sir Wilhelm von
Dörnberg and others, to senior binational commands in the Peninsular
War and at Waterloo. For these senior officers and their descendants,
acceptance by British peers represented a source of great satisfaction.
Anglo-Saxon comrades ‘quickly and readily recognised the efficiency
and capability of the immigrated [Hanoverians]’, the great-nephew of
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55. ‘The King’s German Legion’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, pp. 740–41.
56. Decken, Versuch über den englischen National-Charackter, p. 127.
57. D. cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Oxford, 2001), p. 8.
On the importance of class in British imperialist ideology, see also B. Porter, The Absent-Minded
Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford, 2004).
58. See reviews of cannadine, Ornamentalism, by A. Burton, American Historical Review, cvii
(2002), pp. 497–8, and i.c. Fletcher, Victorian Studies, xlv (2003), pp. 532–4.
59. On English ‘Teutomania’, see P. Mandler, The English National Character: The History of
an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven and London, 2006), pp. 86–105.
60. christian F. von Ompteda, A Hanoverian-English Officer a Hundred Years Ago, ed. L. von
Ompteda, tr. J. Hill (London, 1892), p. 173.
61. Hartmann, Der Königlich Hannoversche General Sir Julius von Hartmann, pp. 196–7. See
also Runnebaum, General Graf Carl von Alten, p. 129.
62. The Times, 19 June 1851, p. 5, ‘The Waterloo Banquet’.
63. The French newspaper La Presse had noticed the transnational habitus of Waterloo veterans
a few years earlier. See the issue of 22 June 1845, p. 2. For a detailed description of the occasion,
see The Lancaster Gazette and General Advertiser for Lancashire, Westmoreland and Yorkshire, 20
Nov. 1852, p. 5, ‘The Duke of Wellington’s Funeral’.
64. For lists of high-ranking officers alive in the 1850s and 1860s, see The Times, ‘The Waterloo
Banquet’, and Die Königlich Deutsche Legion und das Hannoversche Corps bei Waterloo: Ein
Erinnerungskranz für das Land Hannover zum 18. Juni 1865 (Hannover, 1865), pp. 40–41.
65. Milkes, ‘A Battle’s Legacy’, pp. 350–51.
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the KGL colonel christian von Ompteda proudly observed, ‘and looked
on their officers as “gentlemen”’.60 General von Hartmann, who visited
London in 1838 for Queen Victoria’s coronation, likewise appreciated
the warm welcome which he and his compatriots received from former
comrades, the duke of Wellington and other ‘important men’. He
took this as confirmation that ‘we Hanoverians, but particularly we
legionnaires, are held in high regard by this great nation’.61 The annual
Waterloo banquets at Wellington’s London residence, Apsley House,
afforded irregularly attending Hanoverian officers the opportunity to
reciprocate by assuring the ageing duke that the ‘old men’ of their army
made it a point to celebrate his birthday.62 They also joined representatives
from other armies that had fought with or under Wellington to take a
leading part in the funeral procession of their former commander in
1852, as ceremonial bearers of his Hanoverian field marshal’s baton. in
so doing, the mourners reactivated transnational connections born out
of a sense of shared military achievement and a powerful language of
mutual understanding between Allied Waterloo veterans.63 Although
their ranks were thinning by mid-century, the clout of the surviving
officers increased in inverse proportion as they moved into leadership
positions. Only the retirement of Hanover’s last minister of war in 1866
brought the reign of these Anglo-Hanoverian veterans, and with it their
social networks, to an end.64
class solidarity and military comradeship extended in two directions.
The cultivation of Anglo-Hanoverian affinities enabled officers to
recognise each other’s achievements in the Napoleonic Wars, and at the
same time fashioned a joint platform for interaction with the public at
large in efforts to honour the dead. The sacralisation of the Waterloo
battlefield is a case in point. The central shrine to fallen Britons, Waterloo
church, was discreetly supranational in that it concomitantly housed
commemorative plaques to the Hanoverian officers (and even rankers)
who had died under Wellington’s command.65 The farmhouse of La
Haye Sainte, ‘so gallantly defended’ by the KGL, conjured analogous
associations for British battlefield visitors, as did the Hanoverian
Monument erected by KGL officers for their deceased brothers-in-arms
1421
in 1818. When two English gentlemen discovered the memorial in a
state of neglect in the early 1840s, they went to considerable lengths to
apprise the appropriate authorities of the situation. ‘i trust’, charles
White, a former aide to the duke of cambridge, explained to the
adjutant general of King Ernst August, ‘that my motives for troubling
you will not be attributed to any other feeling than to the regret
i should suffer at the record of so much valour being allowed to fall into
decay for the want of a few timely repairs—and to my deep interest and
veneration for all matters connected with a country where i met with so
much kindness and hospitality.’66 The king did not doubt White’s good
intentions and promptly attended to the repairs.
Anglo-Hanoverian collaboration in the preservation of battlefield
monuments was emblematic of wider efforts by survivors of the
Napoleonic campaigns to assert entitlements to public recognition.
Partnership promised palpable benefits that unilateral action did not,
the most important of these being mutual validation. Veterans and
their historians could not easily praise the martial prowess of their own
side without appearing immodest or biased, but foreign endorsement
was a different matter altogether. The German translator of N. Ludlow
Beamish’s History of the King’s German Legion (1832–7; translated in
1837) admitted as much in his foreword when he explained that the
initiative of an Englishman had been needed to undertake such a book
project because of the ‘exaggerated modesty’ of his countrymen.67 in
acknowledgement of his services, surviving KGL officers presented
Beamish with an appropriate gift, a finely crafted silver table
centrepiece worth no less than £900.68 conversely, the attachment of
the Hanoverians to Wellington’s command in the Peninsula and at
Waterloo made these foreigners a valuable source of information for
British military chroniclers; captain William Siborne, the infamous
model-maker and author of the groundbreaking History of the War
in France and Belgium in 1815 (1848), drew extensively on eyewitness
accounts from KGL officers.69 The affiliation of the legionnaires with
the British army furthermore ensured that respected soldiers were ready
to speak up for Wellington when he faced criticism in Germany. His
‘intimate friendship’ with General von Hartmann, for instance, helped
to calm the waves after some notoriously impolitic remarks about
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66. Hannover, N[iedersächsisches] H[aupt-]St[aats-]A[rchiv], Hann. 41, xxi, Nr. 158, charles
White to General Ernst von Linsingen, 27 Aug. 1840. See also the letter by Edmund Henry
Plunkett in the same folder. Tellingly, too, the enterprising artist Louise B[onaist] catered to the
tastes of British tourists on the battlefield after 1815 by painting souvenir ceramics with scenes of
Waterloo church as well as the Hanoverian Monument: Milkes, ‘A Battle’s Legacy’, p. 378.
67. Translator’s foreword, in Beamish, Geschichte der Königlich Deutschen Legion, vol. i,
pp. xiv–xv.
68. ‘The King’s German Legion’, Colburn’s United Service Magazine, 1852, Part 1, p. 393. The
trophy can now be seen at the National Army Museum in London (NAM.2004-08-1-1).
69. P. Hofschröer, Wellington’s Smallest Victory: The Duke, the Model Maker and the Secret of
Waterloo (London, 2004), pp. 118–19.
70. Hartmann, Der Königlich Hannoversche General Sir Julius von Hartmann, p. 184; John
Bull and Britannia, 14 June 1856, p. 384, ‘Death of a Peninsular Veteran’. The scandal occurred
when the Prussian military establishment took offence at comments made by Wellington during
parliamentary hearings on the abolition of corporal punishment in the British army. See ‘Die
Aussagen des Herzogs von Wellington über die Disciplin der preußischen Armee’, MilitairWochenblatt, xxi (1836), pp. 97–102.
71. Hartmann, Der Königlich Hannoversche General Sir Julius von Hartmann, p. 184. cf.
Hartmann’s ‘Berichtigung einiger Ansichten über die Verhältnisse der englischen Armee’,
Hannoversches Militairisches Journal, ii (1832), pp. 88–113.
72. L. Smurthwaite, ‘Glory is Priceless! Awards to the British Army during the French
Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars’, in A.J. Guy, ed., The Road to Waterloo: The British Army
and the Struggle against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, 1793–1815 (London, 1990), p. 177.
H. Strachan, The Reform of the British Army, 1830–54 (Manchester, 1984), pp. 18–19.
73. S.H. Myerly, British Military Spectacle: From the Napoleonic Wars through the Crimea
(cambridge, MA, 1996), p. 93.
74. ‘Affairs at Home and Abroad’, Colburn’s United Service Journal, 1841, Part 2, pp. 406–7.
75. Beamish, preface, Geschichte der Königlich Deutschen Legion, vol. i, p. ix.
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Prussian discipline at Waterloo in 1836.70 Likewise, Hartmann played
his part in defending the conduct of the British forces against outside
criticism by rebutting claims put forth in the works of the French
military historian General Maximilien Foy, author of Histoire de la
guerre de la péninsule sous Napoléon (1827).71
Still, there was one issue on which Wellington and even the most
loyal Peninsular veterans parted company; but this, too, served to keep
the transnational comradeship of the old soldiers alive. For years the
participants in the campaigns in Portugal and Spain lobbied unsuccessfully
for a token of official recognition on a par with the Waterloo Medal (1816).
in spite of his pre-eminent role in the Peninsular War, the duke blocked
these advances because he considered the thanks of Parliament to have
been sufficient, and Waterloo ‘an occurrence of an extraordinary nature’.72
Raising the profile of the iberian theatre of war sat awkwardly with his
personal ambition to elevate Waterloo above all other victories, and so
himself above other victors. Many veterans had missed out on this final
battle by being stationed elsewhere and were galled to receive no outward
mark of their achievements and long service. Tensions between Waterloo
and Peninsular regiments consequently led to more than one serious riot.73
The termination of the Anglo-Hanoverian union had the unforeseen
benefit of clearing the way for Hanoverian recognition of the KGL’s
Peninsular war record. On 11 May 1841 King Ernst August issued a
campaign medal (Kriegsdenkmünze) as a ‘testimonial of the high and
well-merited favour’ in which the veterans were held, and recipients
still on active duty had the initials KDM marked against their name on
army lists.74 contrary to all expectations, the king’s gesture rekindled
the friendship between the Hanoverian veterans and their frustrated
British counterparts. Shortly after the promulgation of the decree,
Major christoph Heise of the Gardejäger—the same man who had
egged on Beamish to write the History of the King’s German Legion75—
contacted the editor of the United Service Journal to emphasise that
A N D H A N OV E R i A N M E M O RY, 1815 – 1915
1423
[i]t would have afforded us [legionnaires] infinite delight, if we had been
able, long since, to congratulate our brave comrades of the British service
on a similar testimony of Royal favour, in appreciation of services, which
in our case have now been so graciously rewarded by our Sovereign, and
which we trust, will ere long be awarded to our old companions-in-arms,
no less deserving of the honourable motto – Tapfer und Treu [courageous
and Faithful]!76
76. ‘Affairs at Home and Abroad’, p. 406.
77. Smurthwaite, ‘Glory is Priceless!’, p. 172. For further details on the applicants, see also
NHStA, Hann. 38D, Nr. 1241.
78. it similarly says a great deal about the extent of the overlapping conceptions of valour that
Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas, chancellor of the Order of St Michael and St George in 1840, chose
to include the Hanoverian Order of the Guelphs in his four-volume compendium of British
knighthood orders, on account of its conferral on so ‘many hundreds of British Subjects’: Nicholas
Harris Nicolas, History of the Orders of Knighthood (4 vols., London, 1842), vol. i, pp. l–li.
79. Robert Burford and H.A. Barker, Description of a View of the Battle of Waterloo: With the
Disposition of the Troops Engaged in the Action, Fought on the 18th of June 1815. Now Exhibiting
at the Panorama, Leicester Square (London, 1842). See also the review of a second panorama by
Burford in Colburn’s United Service Magazine, 1852, Part 3, p. 582; Slade, Travels in Germany and
Russia, pp. 37–41.
80. Hartmann, Der Königlich Hannoversche General Julius von Hartmann, pp. 156–7, 161,
174. See also id., Lebenserinnerungen: Briefe und Aufsätze des Generals der Cavallerie Julius von
Hartmann (Berlin, 1882), pp. 12–19.
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The United Service Journal, for its part, was quick to praise Ernst
August’s ‘act of justice and grace’, and joined the plea for Queen Victoria
to emulate his example. Although the creation of the Hanoverian
Peninsular Medal failed to sway Horse Guards and Parliament in the
short term, it undoubtedly sped up royal authorisation of the Military
General Service Medal in 1847, which vindicated Hanoverian and
British veterans alike since the General Order imposed no restriction
on binational eligibility. More than 1,300 Hanoverian veterans went
on to apply for the Military General Service Medal.77 The two
respective Peninsular awards in this way paid conspicuous tribute to
the collaborative spirit of British and Hanoverian discourses about
military valour far into the mid-nineteenth century.78 The way in which
the veterans chose to share valour rather than to divide up martial
achievement along strictly national lines had a knock-on effect on the
British public sphere, where bourgeois entertainment media such as
Slade’s travelogues and Robert Burford’s popular Waterloo panoramas
in Leicester Square, London, accorded Hanoverians a prominent
place in Wellington’s victories.79 No such reminders were needed in
Hanover, since the veterans of the King’s German Legion considered
themselves to be a living monument to British military traditions on
the continent, earning them the nickname ‘the Englishmen’ among
their half-admiring, half-jealous countrymen for their feats against
Napoleon in Spain and Sicily.80
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T H E N A P O L E O N i c WA R S i N B R i T i S H
iii
81. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, ‘introduction: inventing Traditions’, in eid., eds., The
Invention of Tradition (cambridge, 1983), p. 2.
82. Strachan, Reform of the British Army, p. 56.
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The prolonged struggle of Peninsular veterans for recognition illustrates
how politics subtly, yet decisively, set the parameters of public debate
about the Napoleonic Wars. The further Britain and Hanover moved
away in time from the personal union, the more ideological points of
reference and the significance attached to particular events were bound
to shift. To draw out some of these developments in cultural memory, the
last part of this article will examine the transition of Anglo-Hanoverian
military comradeship from a transnational social space to the
(attempted) construction of ‘invented traditions’. Eric Hobsbawm and
Terence Ranger wrote that invented traditions are sociological responses
to ‘novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations,
or which establish their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition’.81 in
practice, of course, the cultural engineers of fabricated customs in the
nineteenth century often operated within time-honoured conventions
already calibrated to regulate and solve recurring problems. The tragic
story of the so-called British German Legion during the crimean War
exemplifies the intersection of genuine historical continuity, adaptive
invention and partisan politics that would turn the Hanoverian
legionnaires from an asset into a liability for Anglo-German relations in
the second half of the nineteenth century.
in 1854, suspicion of Russian autocracy and a resurgent sense of
Britain’s global greatness led the Peelite-Liberal administration of the
Earl of Aberdeen to engage in the first major war between the European
powers since 1815, an event for which the country was woefully
unprepared. it soon became apparent that no fewer than 90,000 new
recruits were needed to augment the army’s peacetime establishment of
100,000 men.82 The recruitment crisis was disconcerting, but cabinet
and Parliament could relate to it historically by applying the perceived
lessons of eighteenth-century manpower shortages and, most recently,
the French Wars. The notion of historia magistra vitae still loomed large
because the army’s basic method of recruitment—voluntary enlistment
and the hiring of foreign troops—had not changed much in the previous
hundred years. Economic boom conditions and employers’ fear of
adverse effects on the availability of labour hampered recruitment in
Britain, and therefore forced the government to give more thought to
the time-honoured remedy of foreign enlistment. Aberdeen’s ministry
initially hesitated to put legislation to that effect before Parliament,
lest the recruitment of mercenaries from the continent arouse longstanding suspicions about reactionary designs to overthrow liberty in
1425
Britain. Although the Prime Minister’s predictions were not far off
the mark, the recent disintegration of the Tories and the subsequent
collapse of the old party system caused the Foreign Enlistment Bill to
be received in a political climate that deviated sharply from previous
debates. in the House of Lords, where the Secretary for War, the duke
of Newcastle, introduced the bill first to test the waters, the most
heated exchanges took place between Peelites and conservatives, whose
political pedigrees stretched back on both sides to the Tory foreign
enlistment statutes of 1794, 1804 and 1806.
The one, albeit contested, constant in the discussion about the
viability of hiring aliens was the precedent set by the KGL. Newcastle,
a Peelite, envisaged the initial force of 15,000 men as simply reprising
the role of the illustrious Hanoverians. The chief interlocutor for
the conservatives, the earl of Ellenborough, retorted in an overtly
Whiggish, almost Radical, manner that the employment of foreigners,
who could be called out to suppress riots, was contrary to all
constitutional principles. He stressed, moreover, Newcastle’s faulty
historical reasoning, since the Hanoverians of 1803 had been allies in a
joint cause, unlike the despised Hessians of the eighteenth century—
who the mercenaries required for the crimean campaign resembled
more closely. To sink the enlistment bill once and for all, Ellenborough
appealed to British patriotism by dismissing the inferior discipline of
foreign, notably German, soldiers. instead of rising to the bait, the duke
of Richmond, a former Ultra-Tory who had broken ranks over catholic
Emancipation, immediately went to the defence of the KGL’s record,
since he thought it an ‘act of justice’ to remember that ‘on no occasion
was that Legion second to the British army either in zeal or gallantry’.83
And Richmond did not remain the only commentator to take issue
with Ellenborough’s assertion. Enraged, Beamish immediately fired off
letters to the editors of both the left-leaning Morning Chronicle and
the United Service Magazine with contrary testimonies from eminent
British generals.84 John Duncan Bligh, the British envoy to Hanover,
meanwhile appeased hurt Hanoverian pride by blaming the course of
debates in Parliament on politicians’ ‘overweening vanity’ in the pursuit
of victory for their party.85
The leader of the conservatives, the earl of Derby, quickly sensed
that his associate had overplayed the party’s hand and changed tack. He
conceded in the Lords that the Hanoverians had performed with equal
distinction to the other members of the British army, but only because
they were ‘almost countrymen’ anyway. To salvage Ellenborough’s
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83. 3Hans cxxxvi (14 Dec. 1854), 257–63.
84. Morning Chronicle, 26 Dec. 1854, ‘To the Editor’; Morning Chronicle, 28 Dec. 1854, ‘To the
Editor’; ‘The King’s German Legion’, Colburn’s United Service Magazine, 1855, Part 1, pp. 246–50.
85. John Duncan Bligh to the earl of clarendon, 30 Dec. 1854, cited in Mösslang, Manias and
Riotte, British Envoys to Germany, iv. 232.
86. 3Hans cxxxvi (14 Dec. 1854), 263–6.
87. T[he] N[ational] A[rchives], P[ublic] R[ecord] O[ffice], HO 45/10399/179658,
Superintendent of the Home Office registry to customs and Excise, 28 May 1909. See also
A. Fahrmeir, Citizens and Aliens: Foreigners and the Law in Britain and the German States, 1789–
1870 (New York, 2000), pp. 44–5.
88. c.c. Bayley, Mercenaries for the Crimea: The German, Swiss, and Italian Legions in British
Service, 1854–1856 (Montreal and London, 1977), pp. 51–5.
89. The York Herald, 18 Aug. 1855, ‘The Queen’s Visit to the Foreign Legion’; The Morning
Post, 19 May 1855.
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critique concerning the dissimilarity of the KGL and the proposed
foreign legion, he continued that the Hanoverian legionnaires had
been no foreigners at all as ‘subjects of the Sovereign of this country,
whose battles they were fighting’.86 in pursuing this line of argument,
Derby replaced Newcastle’s invented tradition with one of his own.
The Act of Succession of 1700 and a complementary act passed at the
accession of George i made a clear distinction between the subjects of
the crown in the British isles and those on the continent. True, Derby
would have been unable to claim this kinship had there not already
been uncertainty about the standing of Hanoverians in British law, but
with his bold interpretation he pre-empted, perhaps even prefigured, a
Home Office ruling of 1909, some sixty years later, that Hanoverians
had enjoyed the privileges of natural-born British subjects until the
separation of the two crowns.87
Given a choice between two doubtful historical precedents, the
Lords came down on the side of the incumbent government. Following
a three-day debate in the commons in which the Hanoverian
legionnaires were barely mentioned, save for Sir Edward Bulwer
Lytton’s reminder of the widespread hostility to the formation of the
KGL, the bill passed into law. The 1854 Foreign Enlistment Act deviated
appreciably from its 1804 predecessor in so far as it prohibited the
employment of the enlistees for policing duties in the United Kingdom
and precluded officers’ entitlement to half-pay when their period of
active service expired.88 The financial provisions of the act were pitched
too low to attract the most seasoned soldiers and therefore reduced
from the start the likelihood that the new mercenary corps would
ever emulate, as Queen Victoria hoped, ‘the reputation of the King’s
German Legion, so long and so honourably associated with the British
army in its most memorable campaigns’.89 Thus the newly minted
German, Swiss and italian Legions failed to follow in the footsteps of
their Hanoverian predecessors. They arrived too late in the crimea
to take part in the fighting and re-embarked for Britain disgruntled.
One italian contingent mutinied en route home and could only be
persuaded at the last minute not to foment rebellion on the calabrian
coast against King Ferdinand ii of Naples. Jägers of the German Legion
clashed with British troops in an affray at Aldershot that left several
dead. Soon thereafter, the italians and Swiss disbanded under a cloud
1427
of controversy, but the Germans were permitted to stay on as military
settlers in South Africa, only to cause further problems for the colonial
administration there.90
The upshot of the Foreign Enlistment Act was the British government’s
decision never again to raise a European mercenary corps, because the
extirpation of the ‘legionary plagues’ came at too high a price.91 in the
sphere of cultural production the exotic appeal of the KGL retained a
niche in the popular imagination, which military historians, Thomas
Hardy, and intermittent proposals for the resuscitation of foreign
legions drew upon. in 1900, the Scottish novelist Sir Herbert Maxwell
still thought it necessary to counter the not uncommon predilection
among British military chroniclers to count the Hanoverian troops at
Waterloo as British with the injunction to recognise the entitlement
of the Hanoverians, ‘as Germans, to their share of honour in the result
which they contributed so greatly to bring about’. in political terms,
though, the crimean fiasco damaged the reputation of the KGL
beyond repair and so prompted a progressive devaluation in public
appreciation of its achievements.92
in Hanover, the joint military heritage of the Napoleonic Wars
seemed headed for a similar fate barely a decade later. The disbandment
of the Guelph army in 1866, and with it the customs of the KGL,
sent an unmistakeable signal that becoming Prussian demanded
cultural assimilation into a ‘community of forgetting’.93 The lack of
commonalities with Prussian military culture and its particularism made
the Legion unattractive for commemoration, whereas ‘Waterloo’ fared
somewhat better because of Prussian involvement in the battle and the
consequent refashioning of the monarchical-transnational anniversary
into a symbol of liberal nationalism.94 But, as Benedict Anderson
has shown, the problem with complex ‘imagined communities’ such
as nations is that enforced amnesia cannot be complete; suppressed
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90. Bayley, Mercenaries for the Crimea, pp. 118–33. As a historical footnote, it is interesting to
note that the resettled German legionnaires named one of their townships on the cape ‘Hanover’:
W.B. Tyler, ‘The British German Legion, 1854–62’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical
Research, liv (1976), p. 29.
91. Lord clarendon cited in J. Laband, ‘From Mercenaries to Military Settlers: The British
German Legion, 1854–1861’, in S.M. Miller, ed., Soldiers and Settlers in Africa, 1850–1918 (Leiden,
2009), p. 121. cf. J.B. conacher, Britain and the Crimea, 1855–56: Problems of War and Peace
(Basingstoke, 1987), pp. 134–5.
92. Emphasis in the original: Herbert Maxwell, ‘Our Allies at Waterloo’, Nineteenth Century,
xlviii (1900), p. 410. The Hanoverian position at La Haye Sainte Farm did in fact form an
integral part of British battlefield travelogues into the 1870s and 1880s. See The Lancaster Gazette
Supplement, 29 Dec. 1875, ‘christmas Day on the Field of Waterloo’; The Ipswich Journal, 20 July
1878, ‘The Eye church choir in Belgium’; The Leeds Mercury, 24 Jan. 1885, ‘Waterloo—A Visit
to the Battlefield’.
93. Ernest Renan, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’ et autres écrits politiques (1882; Paris, 1995), p. 228.
94. Bismarck: Die Gesammelten Werke, Vib, ed. F. Thimme (2nd edn., Berlin, 1931), document
1508, pp. 249–50 (Bismarck to count Otto zu Stolberg-Wernigerode, 17 Feb. 1870); G. Schneider,
‘Die Waterloogedenkfeier 1915’, Hannoversche Geschichtsblätter, xlv (2011), pp. 207–38; M. John,
‘Liberalism and Society in Germany, 1850–1880: The case of Hanover’, ante, cii (1987), p. 589.
95. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
(2nd edn., London and New York, 1991), pp. 199–203.
96. Berlin-Lichterfelde, Bundesarchiv, R43/1403, fo. 151v, Prussian interior minister to the
German chancellor, secret, 27 Aug. 1899; E. Schröder, Ein Tagebuch Kaiser Wilhelms II: 1888–
1902 nach Hof- und anderen Berichten (Breslau, 1903), p. 306. For a discussion of Wilhelm ii’s
complicated relationship with England, see J.c.G. Röhl, ‘Der Kaiser und England’, in W. Rogasch,
ed., Vicky & Albert, Vicky & The Kaiser (Ostfildern-Ruit, 1997), pp. 165–86. On the diplomatic
context, see L. Reinermann, Der Kaiser in England: Wilhelm II. und sein Bild in der britischen
Öffentlichkeit (Paderborn, 2001), p. 183; H. Rosenbach, Das Deutsche Reich, Grossbritannien und
der Transvaal (1896–1902): Anfänge deutsch-britischer Entfremdung (Göttingen, 1993), pp. 91–114.
97. E. Hobsbawm, ‘Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914’, in id. and Ranger, eds.,
The Invention of Tradition, pp. 263–307.
98. R. von Zedlitz-Trützschler, Zwölf Jahre am deutschen Kaiserhof (Berlin and Leipzig, 1924),
pp. 56–7.
99. Schneider, ‘...nicht umsonst gefallen’?, p. 168.
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memories have a habit of resurfacing when socio-political power
relations change, or the readmission of particular memories is deemed
to be useful.95 Unlike his predecessors, Kaiser Wilhelm ii was alive to the
potential of Waterloo as a historical model, and initiated a controlled
rehabilitation of Hanover’s English heritage in order to serve his
personal diplomacy at the turn of the century. in doing so, he initially
shuttled quite seamlessly between foreign, national and local audiences.
in addressing the British public in September 1898, he carefully chose
the evocative backdrop of the Waterloo column to maximise the effect
of his congratulations to the victorious forces of his grandmother,
Queen Victoria, in the Sudan. Some months later, he issued a ‘decree on
tradition’ (Traditionserlass) for domestic consumption which appointed
sixteen Prussian regiments and battalions as the ‘heirs’ to the AngloHanoverian units present at Waterloo. in addition to satisfying his
emotional curiosity about the country of his revered grandmother—
and sealing a temporary rapprochement between Britain and Germany
following from the Angola Treaty of August 1898—Wilhelm ii counted
on this second symbolic gesture to soften lingering resistance towards
Prussian state-building in Hanover.96
The Traditionserlass gave a strong demonstration of the ‘massproduced traditions’ that defined the Kaiser’s reign.97 Privately, members
of the imperial entourage confessed that the blending of Prussian
and Guelph military folklore had ‘absolutely nothing’ to do with the
historic facts.98 in crucial contrast to the 1854 Foreign Enlistment Act,
the far more manipulated reinvention of the KGL tradition did succeed
in provoking a response. To show gratitude for the ‘relegitimisation’ of
their past, veteran Hanoverian army officers presented the Kaiser with
a miniature silver statue of the Waterloo column on the anniversary of
the great battle in 1899.99 More importantly, bourgeois newspapers sided
with the scandal-prone, impetuous monarch when he commended the
Hanoverian and Prussian forces at Waterloo for having ‘saved the British
army from destruction’ during the KGL centenary commemorations in
1903. The Pall Mall Gazette warned that ‘[w]ords are arrows which
1429
fly fast and far in these days’, but the hostile reaction of the British
media scarcely registered in Hanover, or, where it did, evinced little
sympathy.100
The success of the Prusso-Hanoverian Waterloo myth and the
simultaneous Anglo-Hanoverian estrangement stemmed from the
convergence of two broad developments in the last thirty years of the
nineteenth century. First, the British government’s renewed partisanship
for Denmark in the Second Schleswig-Holstein War (1863–4), as
German patriots saw it, and the foundation of the Kaiserreich at the
end of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) accelerated a process of
national differentiation which was reflected in the politicisation of
Waterloo monuments.101 The proliferation of German war memorials
for the casualties of the Franco-Prussian War, combined with the good
care of the existing Hanoverian cenotaphs at Waterloo, put British
patriots on the spot. To pay their fallen compatriots the same respect,
Lord Vivian, the minister at Brussels, raised money in 1887 through
various subscriptions in the United Kingdom and Belgium for a new
Waterloo memorial at Evère.102 The competitive nationalist spirit of
battlefield statuomania had a snowball effect on the domestic political
mass market, where the sponsorship and refurbishment of monuments
were traded for patriotic prestige—with sometimes amusing results.
An architect tasked by the German embassy to carry out repairs on
the Hanoverian Monument found to his great surprise on visiting
Waterloo in April 1909 that the work had already been completed by
an agent of the duke of cumberland, the head of the deposed royal
family of Hanover. The architect’s chagrin was only exceeded by the
disappointment of the imperial government and the provincial diet
of Hanover, after two years of budget negotiations for the planned
restoration.103
Second, the process of national differentiation facilitated a
reconfiguration of nationalism in both countries. Fears about the
future, engendered by worries over the consequences of domestic
reform and Britain’s increasingly precarious geopolitical situation,
A N D H A N OV E R i A N M E M O RY, 1815 – 1915
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100. Pall Mall Gazette, 21 Dec. 1903, ‘The Unruly Member’. The Hanoverian socialists
lampooned the supportive response of the bourgeois press in Volkswille, 22 Dec. 1903, p. 2, ‘Die
Traditionsfeierlichkeiten’.
101. The deteriorating image of Britain in Hanoverian public opinion comes through clearly
in the envoys’ reports to the Foreign Office. See Mösslang, Manias and Riotte, British Envoys to
Germany, vol. iv, esp. pp. 261–2.
102. See correspondence relating to the monument at Evère in TNA, PRO, FO 10/655.
On the ‘nationalisation’ of the Napoleonic Wars in Germany after 1871, note F. Akaltin, Die
Befreiungskriege im Geschichtsbild der Deutschen im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main, 1997),
pp. 119, 281. For details of the Prussian government’s maintenance of the German monuments at
Waterloo, see Berlin, Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes, R 130489.
103. See correspondence relating to the restoration of the Hanoverian Monument (1907–11)
in NHStA, Hann. 122a, Nr. 3468, fos. 199–201, 213–19, 220–22, 232, 242–3; Protokolle des 43.
Hannoverschen Provinziallandtags (Hannover, 1909), third session, 12 March 1909, pp. 52–4.
104. Northern Echo, 6 April 1900, ‘Foreign Legions’; D. Bell, ‘imagined Spaces: Nation, State,
and Territory in the British colonial Empire, 1860–1914’, in W. Mulligan and B. Simms, eds., The
Primacy of Foreign Policy in British History, 1660–2000: How Strategic Concerns Shaped Modern
Britain (Basingstoke, 2010), pp. 197–213; S. Attridge, Nationalism, Imperialism, and Identity in
Late Victorian Culture: Civil and Military Worlds (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 45–8.
105. Media coverage of Britain decreased after the mid-century as official pre-censorship ceased
and political commentators no longer used the United Kingdom as proxy for German issues
they were not permitted to write about. in the late 1880s Hanover hosted an English-language
weekly, The Anglo-American, but its target readership were expatriates rather than Hanoverians:
R. Muhs, ‘Geisteswelten: Rahmenbedingungen des deutsch-britischen Kulturaustauschs im 19.
Jahrhundert’, in id., J. Paulmann and W. Steinmetz, eds., Aneignung und Abwehr: Interkultureller
Transfer zwischen Deutschland und Großbritannien im 19. Jahrhundert (Bodenheim, 1998), p. 61.
106. For a discussion of the historical malleability of the Heimat idea, see A. confino, Germany
as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History (chapel Hill, Nc, 2006),
pp. 57–80. cf. also G.S. Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic
Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (chicago, iL, 2004).
107. Hannoverscher Anzeiger, 7 Feb. 1900; see the collection of clippings from this and other
Hanoverian dailies in Hannover, Stadtarchiv, HR 39, Nr. 133, and, in the same folder, Magistrate
of Hannover to the office of the commander of the x Army corps, 24 Feb. 1900.
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led a diverse coalition of politicians and intellectuals to propose the
fusion of the British motherland with her white settler colonies in a
vast political-economic unit akin to a global nation-state. The idea
of ‘Greater Britain’ militated against indulgence of the old AngloHanoverian space of memory, as the army’s erstwhile dependence on
auxiliaries from the continent detracted from ‘national efficiency’ in
imperial defence.104 colonial rivalry also became a contributing factor
in Germany, but the main reasons for the marginalisation of Hanover’s
cosmopolitan history were sheer ignorance about British affairs and the
rise of ‘homeland’ (Heimat) ideology from the 1880s.105 The Heimat
banner, like ‘Greater Britain’ imperialism, mobilised a diverse array of
activists, including environmentalists, proto-völkisch thinkers, agrarian
anti-modernists, civil servants and liberal middle-class patriots, in
defence of national ‘character’. This enabled heimatlers to construct
mythic pasts that were only secondarily governed by rules of historical
fact.106 Hanoverian heimatlers could thus in 1903 ‘re-remember’
their ancestors fighting with the Prussians to save the British army
at Waterloo, instead of seeing them as subordinates of the duke of
Wellington, and hence part of the British war effort.
At the same time the Heimat idea followed its own logic, which
sometimes conflicted with the original intent of the Kaiser’s invented
traditions. The failure to return the standards of the KGL to Hannover,
after Wilhelm ii had ordered them to Berlin for his personal inspection,
set off a hard-fought campaign in early 1900 for their release. The
Hannoversche Anzeiger, the provincial capital’s largest daily newspaper,
declared without hesitation that His Majesty’s inconsiderateness
represented a ‘demonstration of unscrupulous centralisation’. The Kaiser
eventually relented after Hannover’s magistrate had lodged an equally
plain protest note with the military commander of the province.107 These
passionate complaints were a potent display of bourgeois and municipal
1431
self-assertion against the central government, which exposed cracks in
the Prusso-Hanoverian consensus on the public commemoration of
the Napoleonic Wars, and showed that local elites were willing to wrest
political authority from the sovereign for the protection of their regional
Heimat. Activism of this kind limited imperial interventions, yet also
made it more difficult, ultimately, to imagine the KGL’s place in history
other than from a heimatlich perspective.
As Britain and Germany moved into the First World War, the
centennial of Waterloo, far from moderating belligerent rhetoric,
cemented Anglo-Hanoverian estrangement. Though the anniversary
‘necessarily pass[ed] very quietly’ in Britain, so as not to embarrass
the French, The Times and the Daily Telegraph exploited the occasion
to castigate Prussian militarism as a continuation of Napoleonic
militarism—‘the negation of all law, of all treaties, and all rights’—
in order to cast their own nation now and then as the champion of
liberty in Europe.108 Wellington’s German troops were glossed over or
lumped with the militaristic Prussians. One officer, who still smarted
from the Kaiser’s ‘determined effort to produce discord in the universal
recognition of Wellington’s victory’ in 1903, took out his anger on
Hanoverians in the United Service Magazine by harping on the alleged
cowardice of the cumberland Hussars during the battle.109
Those slighted in this way repaid in kind, and on a much grander
scale, for they did not have the feelings of allies to consider. in Hannover
100,000 spectators gathered at the Waterloo column to remember 18
June as a German victory won for the liberation of Europe. On the
same day, the municipal Fatherland Museum opened a special Waterloo
exhibition intended to highlight the commonality of purpose between
the 1815 campaign and the present war, namely the fight, in the words
of the curator, for the ‘fate of Europe, even the world, and above all the
existence, future and honour of the German people, forever’. in keeping
with the spirit of wartime Anglophobia, the centenary festivities played
down the military role of Britain. in order to sidestep the nationally
diverse composition of Wellington’s divisions, the Fatherland Museum
commissioned a large diorama depicting the defence of La Haye Sainte
Farm with the aim of recreating an exclusively Hanoverian moment
of glory.110 And yet, even at this point, their historical entwinement
locked the former allies in a dialogue of sorts. The claim made by the
A N D H A N OV E R i A N M E M O RY, 1815 – 1915
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108. The Times, 18 June 1915, p. 9, ‘Waterloo’; Daily Telegraph, 18 June 1915, p. 8, ‘Waterloo’.
See also T.c.W. Blanning, ‘18. Juni 1815: Waterloo’, in E. François and U. Puschner, eds.,
Erinnerungstage: Wendepunkte der Geschichte von Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 2010),
p. 179.
109. R.H. Mackenzie, ‘Some Words on Wellington and Waterloo’, United Service Magazine,
June 1915, p. 267. cf. also H. Belloc, ‘The Effect of Waterloo’, The Dublin Review, clvii (1915), p. 132.
110. W. Pessler, ‘Deutsche Waterloo-Erinnerungen im Vaterländischen Museum der Stadt
Hannover’, Hannoversche Geschichtsblätter, xviii (1915), pp. 293–338; id., ‘Die WaterlooJahrhundert-Ausstellung im Vaterländischen Museum der Stadt Hannover’, Hannoversche
Geschichtsblätter, xviii (1915), pp. 389–416.
in an interesting thought experiment, one scholar queried not long
ago whether it is possible to extricate European lieux de mémoire
such as Waterloo from their fundamental entwinement with national
ideologies.113 The attempt to arrive at an ontological separation poses
a major and perhaps ultimately unanswerable challenge. During the
nineteenth century’s ‘age of nationalism’, sites of memory and historical
events that held meaning for several countries invariably mirrored or
reinforced particular nationalist forms of memory. To escape the barren
conclusion that partisan agendas prevailed requires us to address the issue
from the other end, by interrogating how transnational social spaces and
associated collective memories impacted on national polities.114 in this
vein, this article has made a case for the points of convergence between
the memory cultures that the war effort against Napoleon forged in
Britain and her one-time German dependency, Hanover. it examined
initially the social settings of these encounters in order to elucidate key
areas of overlap in the remembered war experience after 1815. charity
helped British philanthropists relate to the continent in general and
women in particular as fellow victims of the financial and psychological
111. Hannoverscher Courier, 18 June 1915, no. 31834, evening edition, p. 5, ‘Besuch von
Waterloo’. On the importance of external validation, see also Prof. Dr. Goebel, ‘Des Königs
Deutsche Legion’, Hannoverland, ix (1915), p. 70.
112. M. Middlebrook, The Kaiser’s Battle (Harmondsworth, 2000), p. 47.
113. S.B. Frandsen, ‘Schleswig: Ein Erinnerungsort für Deutsche und Dänen’, in Henningsen
et al., eds., Transnationale Erinnerungsorte, p. 32. For a historiographical overview of the problems
involved in trying to pinpoint European memory, see c. cornelissen, ‘Die Nationalität von
Erinnerungskulturen als ein gesamteuropäisches Phänomen’, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und
Unterricht, lxii (2011), pp. 5–16.
114. On this subject see also Jan Werner Müller, who pleads for further analysis of the
correlation between national memory and international relations: J.W. Müller, ‘introduction: The
Power of Memory, the Memory of Power and the Power over Memory’, in id., ed., Memory and
Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past (cambridge, 2002), pp. 1–38.
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T H E N A P O L E O N i c WA R S i N B R i T i S H
1432
exhibition’s organisers, that the ‘warlike spirit’ of the German warriors
at Waterloo defeated Napoleon, was itself an implied rejoinder to
the vilification of Prusso-German militarism by British propaganda.
Moreover, the foreign distinctions and praise awarded to soldiers lost
none of their symbolic capital as external confirmation of Hanoverian
valour. ‘And when King Edward’s misguided heirs’, the Hannoverscher
Courier prophesied, ‘will compare the accomplishments of the auxiliary
peoples, whom they are employing against Germany in this war, with
the services that German armies rendered them a hundred years ago,
it is only to be expected that they will one day send the sorrowful cry
across the channel: Germany, Germany, give me back your legions!’111
in fact, by a twist of fate, Hanoverian regiments ended up doing the
shouting across the wastelands of the Western Front as they taunted
British regiments with the reminder that their ancestors had earned
battle honours together once upon a time.112
1433
distress brought on by almost twenty-five years of uninterrupted
warfare, just as the horizontal ties of ‘class’, professional respect, mutual
political interests and the kinship of survivors maintained channels
of communication among veteran officers. These were viable options
because the invocation of Anglo-Hanoverian comradeship did not so
much undercut as contribute to national pride and, in Hanover’s case,
particularist state-building.
On a second axis, the discussion has charted the evolution of the
memory of the Napoleonic era over a hundred-year period in order to
explain the remarkable degree of Anglo-Hanoverian alienation evident
by 1914. Philip Konigs insists (with a smidgen of deliberate hyperbole,
to be sure) that the relationship with Hanover was simply ‘forgotten’ in
London after 1837 and that the British share in the victories of Minden,
Salamanca and Waterloo was conversely ‘more and more overlooked’
by Hanoverians.115 The evidence rather suggests a pragmatic dialectic
between forgetting and reinvention of the Anglo-Hanoverian military
heritage. it suited British parliamentarians to recall the services of their
‘almost countrymen’ during the recruitment crisis of the crimean War;
but, when that approach failed, the KGL’s image lapsed into nostalgic
quaintness and, during the First World War, disregard. Across the
channel the Prussian annexation of Hanover relegated the KGL to the
sidelines of official commemorations until Kaiser Wilhelm ii’s ‘decree
on tradition’ brought about a reintegration in 1899. Part of the imperial
fascination with Hanover’s military traditions sprang from their
Englishness, even if the fin de siècle realignment of national discourse
and the Kaiser’s ambivalent Waterloo speech subsequently drowned
out the dialogical undercurrent. Johannes Burkhardt’s conclusion that
the Napoleonic Wars shaped the collective mindset of the German
leadership in the First World War can only therefore be accepted with
reservations, because the invoked historical continuities were of the
Hohenzollern government’s own making, and nowhere more so than in
Hanover, where the war of 1914–18 marked the culmination of a quite
recent refashioning of collective allegiance.116
Since the end of the Second World War the Anglo-Hanoverian
memory space has made a comeback on new terms. Diplomatic and
political considerations have taken the place of invented traditions in a
political conversation that has transcended the bilateral plane to become
truly West European. During her state visit to the Federal Republic of
Germany in 1965, Queen Elizabeth ii ostentatiously abstained from
laying a wreath at the Waterloo column so as not to offend French
A N D H A N OV E R i A N M E M O RY, 1815 – 1915
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115. P. Konigs, The Hanoverian Kings and their Homeland: A Study of the Personal Union,
1714–1837 (Lewes, 1993), pp. 168–9.
116. J. Burkhardt, ‘Kriegsgrund Geschichte? 1870, 1813, 1756—historische Argumente
und Orientierungen bei Ausbruch des Ersten Weltkrieges’, in id., J. Becker, S. Förster and
G. Kronenbitter, eds., Lange und kurze Wege in den Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich, 1996), p. 81.
Historical Institute, University of Bern
JASPER HEiNZEN
117. The Times, 26 June 1965, p. 10, ‘Hanover remembers Waterloo’; Hannoversche Presse
Hameln, 21 May 1965, ‘Waterloo’, clipping to be found in NHStA, VVP 17, Nr. 2035; Die Zeit, 28
May 1965, ‘Was ist uns Waterloo?’.
118. ‘Landesausstellung 2014: Niedersachsen plant historische Ausstellung: 1714—Hannovers
Herrscher auf Englands Thron’, Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur,
http://www.mwk.niedersachsen.de/live/live.php?navigation_id=6257&article_id=19060&_
psmand=19; Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung, 8 Dec. 2009, ‘Ausstellung über Hannovers
Herrscher auf Englands Thron’.
119. colley, Britons, pp. 364–7; A. cunningham, ed., The Life of Sir David Wilkie with his
Journals, Tours and Critical Remarks on Works of Art; and a Selection from his Correspondence (3
vols., London, 1843), ii. 76–7.
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1434
sensibilities. By way of compensation the British army sent six hundred
bandsmen and pipers to entertain the Hanoverian public at the same
venue for the one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Waterloo
one month later. The reconciliatory, pan-European message of the
symbolic act was not lost on the 50,000 spectators. ‘The occasion’, a
correspondent of The Times mused, ‘was indeed one to stir a mixture
of feelings—nostalgia for one’s own dashing military tradition now
vanished, a genuine weakness for Britain rooted in Hanover’s past, and
pride in the fact that the new Germany was now welcomed back as an
ally and comrade in arms on an equal footing.’117 As the tercentennial
of the dynastic union (2014) approaches, the ‘European dimension’ of
the Anglo-Hanoverian connection will once more take centre-stage in
a €5.5 million exhibition to be hosted by the state of Lower Saxony.118
To some the Europeanisation of collective memory may seem little
more than a pragmatic dictate of political necessity to buttress EU
integration; for others it is also a genuine opportunity to challenge
old certainties about the past. Sir David Wilkie’s epic painting Chelsea
Pensioners Reading the Gazette of the Battle of Waterloo (1822) throws into
relief the potential for new insights even from sources that on the surface
celebrate national achievement. Had Wilkie been concerned with the
formative power of war in the making of Great Britain, as Linda colley
asserts in her inquiry into the roots of British identity, then the presence
in the image of a moustachioed Hanoverian legionnaire and a ‘negro
of the band of Foot Guards, who was once servant to the celebrated
Moreau, and accompanied him on his retreat through the Black Forest’
poses a paradox—unless it is assumed that the artist conceived the British
national community in such broad terms as to encompass German
‘almost countrymen’ and French deserters of slave descent.119 Entering
into speculations upon whether Wilkie subscribed to such a view is
beside the point, since the painting’s protagonists and composition attest
more fundamentally to the diverse mobilisation of manpower, unity of
purpose and transnational networks of memory that the wars of 1792–
1815 engendered among allies. These, rather than the sense of nostalgic
loss perceived by Peter Fritzsche and others, may have emerged as the true
long-term legacy of the nineteenth century’s new historical sensibility.
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