Cambridge University Library reveals its rarely seen treasures for Waterloo200

This article originally appeared on Culture24.

By its own admission, Cambridge University Library never set out to assemble a specific, single collection relating to Waterloo, but the strength and breadth of its accessioning over the course of two hundred years has resulted in one the most fascinating collections of written records, maps and book arts relating to the battle in the UK.

A Damned Serious Business: Waterloo 1815, the Battle and its Books mines this impressive collection and includes a letter written from the body-strewn battlefield at Waterloo, an invasion map of the UK, and a book from Napoleon’s personal library in exile, among many other treasures.

Looking at how Waterloo was written about in the immediate aftermath of the battle fought on June 18, 1815, the exhibition includes political propaganda, broadsheets, military drill-books, maps, plans, coloured engravings and early historical accounts of the bloodshed.

It also features artefacts and mementoes from the battlefield itself, including a musket ball and a charred fragment of Hougoumont, the farmhouse which occupied a vital position in Wellington’s line. The relics were collected by a teenage girl visiting the field ten years after the battle.

Other items that have never been on display before include a letter from the traveller William Crackanthorpe to his sister Sarah in August, 1814, giving a first-hand account of a conversation with Napoleon in exile on Elba; and William Turnor’s battlefield letter from Mont St Jean on June 19, 1815.

Describing the the exhilaration, confusion and savagery of the battle Turnor wrote:

“The field of Battle exhibits this morning a most shocking spectacle too dreadful to describe. Buonaparte (sic)…showed the greatest courage; led in person many charges both of infantry & cavalry. The escape of Lord Wellington is next to a miracle, for he was exposed the whole day to the hottest fire. We know not the extent of our loss, but it must be great indeed.”

Turnor’s first hand account offers a visceral counterpoint to the many historical accounts of the campaign that proliferated within months of the battle as Waterloo was assimilated into popular culture, becoming the subject of poems, novels, works of visual art and even comic entertainments.

“The importance of Waterloo was fully recognised by the generations which came after it,” says exhibition co-curator John Wells, “both Byron and Tennyson wrote of Waterloo as an ‘earthquake’. Victor Hugo said that the battle changed the perspective of the human race.

“Waterloo is the most famous battle in modern European history, and from the very first moment soldiers and civilians alike wanted to put their experiences and emotions into words.

“In this exhibition we examine how the battle’s impact was expressed through the written word, and how the documentary records of the time continue to have resonance for us today. Waterloo is still news, two hundred years later.”

Cartoons and a spoof theatrical poster illustrate popular defiance in Britain in the face of a threatened French invasion, while an infantry drill-book shows how the Army went about training its soldiers to defeat Napoleon.

Large-scale volumes illustrated in full colour and published in the years straight after the battle show how the victory was celebrated in Britain through the medium of the book. The poignant memoir of Lady De Lancey highlights the appalling personal cost of the fighting.

Alongside Napoleon’s own copy of Montaigne’s Essais – from his library in exile on St Helena – the exhibition also features an 1834 letter from the Duke of Wellington in which he agrees to present a petition to the House of Lords from Cambridge undergraduates.

But one of the most impressive exhibits is a fold-out, full colour representation of the Duke’s funeral procession in 1852. The fold-out measures more than 20 metres in length and contains a cast of thousands.

• A Damned Serious Business: Waterloo 1815, the Battle and its Books runs until September 16, 2015.

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More on Waterloo200:

Massive 13-metre Waterloo Cartoon emerges from Royal Academy stores for Waterloo Bicentenary

Royal Scots Waterloo Colours to be displayed for last time at Edinburgh Castle

Wordsworth the War Poet emerges from the Napoleonic war clouds in Wordsworth, War and Waterloo

The NPG prepares to show its biggest portrait: The Duke of Wellington's Funeral Procession

Source: http://www.culture24.org.uk/history-and-heritage/military-history/pre-20th-century-conflict/art525644-cambridge-univeristy-library-reveals-its-rarely-seen-treasures-for-waterloo200