Re-Examining “Ground on which was fought the memorable battle of Waterloo”
David Buisseret

In Mapline no. 77 (Spring/Summer 1995, page 11), I published a note to explain that the Newberry had just acquired an early nineteenth-century manuscript map of the site of the battle of Waterloo; at that time I also solicited advice from readers concerning the origin and nature of this map. Many readers responded, and it eventually turned out that there were rather similar manuscript versions of the map at the British Library and at the Public Record Office (as it was then called, now “The National Archives”). The map at the British Library (Additional Manuscripts 57653/3) was slightly larger than the Newberry copy (30 x 23 inches), but showed much the same area in much the same way; it had come in 1968 from the Royal United Service Institution.¹ The map at the Public Record office (WO 78/768/3) was also slightly larger, and had been deposited there at an unknown date by the Board of Ordnance and Inspector General of Fortification. The three maps are at a scale of about 1:5000, and are south-oriented.

I had, then, found maps similar to the Newberry’s map, but had thrown no light on their origin. There the matter rested, until in the summer of 2003 I was able to visit the Royal Engineers’ Museum at Gillingham, on the River Thames a few miles east of London. On display in the galleries there was a map which seems to resolve the whole problem. Roughly five feet long by four feet high (rather irregularly shaped), it had been presented “to the officers of the Corps of Royal Engineers” about 1910. This map, bloodstained and much-creased, had had an extraordinary history, which was described on the accompanying caption, written during the nineteenth century.

Its origin went back to the summer of 1814 when, during a visit to the Netherlands, the duke of Wellington ordered Lieutenant-Colonel Carmichael-Smyth of the Royal Engineers to arrange for some of his topographical engineers to sketch the area, roughly oblong, between Waterloo to the north and Nivelle to the south, eastwards to Genappe and westwards a little past Halle. During the months which followed, four sketch-maps of different parts of this area were completed, and the caption mentions that the northwestern part, near Halle, was the work of Lieutenant John Sparling (as we shall see below, the northeastern part was drawn in April 1815). A certain urgency came into the work as it became plain that the returned Napoleon was massing an army to move northwards into this area, and by mid-June of 1815 the four sketches had been combined into a fair copy; this map was then sent to Wellington’s ally, the prince of Orange.² Meanwhile things were hotting up, so that on June 16th Wellington asked for a similar copy for his own use. There was no time to make another fair copy, so an extemporized map combining the four original versions was sent to the duke from the drawing-office in Brussels. Lieutenant Waters, assigned to deliver it, was at one stage in his journey unhorsed in a skirmish with French cavalry. He feared that he had lost the map, with his horse, but getting to his feet and working a little way forward, “he was delighted to find his horse quietly destroying the vegetables in a garden near the farm-house at Quatre-Bras.” Remounting, he took the map on to Wellington, who after making some annotations passed it on to his chief of staff, Sir William de Lancey.

The battle was now raging fiercely, and Sir William was soon knocked from his horse by a cannon ball which severely wounded him, so that the map became stained with his blood as he fell. After the battle, the document was recovered from his body (he survived for some days, nursed by his wife) by Major John Oldfield RE, who saved it and wrote on it a longish description of its history. Remaining in private hands until 1910, the map was then bought and donated to the Royal Engineers’ Museum, where I was thus able to see it in the summer of 2003.

This de Lancey map, which indeed seems to reflect four different hands, covers an area roughly 12 miles east-west by 10 miles north-south, at a scale of about 1:15000. In 1846, when the map was still in private hands, it was carefully copied at the Quarter-Master General’s Department in Plymouth; this copy went to the Royal United Service Institution, from where it passed to the British Library in 1968 (Additional Manuscripts 57653/4). There are thus three examples of this map, which are various versions of the sketches made by the four engineer officers in 1814-1815: one copy went to the Prince of Orange; one mid-nineteenth-century copy is at the British Library; and the “de Lancey” copy is at the Royal Engineers’ Museum, Gillingham. Of course, none of these copies resembles the map acquired by the Newberry in 1995. What this map seems to be is an enlarged copy of the north-eastern sketch submitted for making the de Lancey map (see our sketch-map for reference). It was drawn and signed by “C. Chaplin,” one of the military surveyors and draftsmen known to have been with the British army in Flanders in 1816,³ and contains the crucial note that it was “copied from a plan which was taken by order of His Grace the Duke of Wellington in the month of April4 prior to the battle.” So we must imagine the surveyor Chaplin, at a loose end in his drafting office once Napoleon had been finally defeated, copying (and enlarging) a version of the map which had turned out to play an important part in the central battle. The Public Record Office map was surely drawn at about the same time and for the same reason; unlike the Newberry map, it remained in the drawing-office until all the draftsmen’s surviving maps passed into the public repository.

The British Library version, coming from the Royal United Service Institution, was probably a later copy. It contains quite a few mis-spellings, and may well have been drawn in the 1840s in Plymouth, at the same time as the British Library’s copy of the de Lancey map. Taken together, these three maps are the surviving evidence for the duke of Wellington’s remarkable order to have the Waterloo site surveyed some months before the battle took place. They form the final pieces of a puzzle that has taken some years to work out. All that we now need is to discover is the fair copy of the de Lancey map given to the Prince of Orange; perhaps it survives somewhere in the Dutch archives, and perhaps in some English archive are copies of the other three maps that, with the PRO/BL/Newberry map, together made up the original de Lancey map …

Acknowledgements
For so small a project, I have accumulated a remarkable number of obligations in the course of this work. I list below in alphabetical order all those who have helped, with my grateful thanks: Katey Archer, Royal Engineers’ Museum; Peter Barber, The British Library; Geraldine Beech, The National Archive; Robert Chase, late of H.M. Consular Service; Matthew Edney, The University of Southern Maine; Arthur Holzheimer, of Highland Park; Claire Lemoine-Isabeau, of the Musée Royal de l’Armée in Brussels; Rose Mitchell of The National Archives; Colonel Nowers, lately of the Royal Engineers’ Museum; Mary Ritzlin of Highland Park; and Stephen Woolgar of the University of Southampton.

¹There is a reproduction of the map in Claire Lemoine-Isabeau, La cartographie du territoire belge de 1780 à 1830 (Brussel, 1997), p. 107.

²Whitworth Porter, History of the Corps of Royal Engineers (9 vols., London 1951-1958), I 380-1.

³See Norman Gash, “Wellington and Waterloo,” in Wellington Studies, II, ed. C.M. Woolgar (Southampton, 1999) p. 235-7. 4Or 21 May 1815, according to the text on the Gillingham map.