‘For Want of a Better Cause’: Lord Byron’s War with Posterity

Abstract

On 6 July 1815, a year before Byron made his legendary journey to Waterloo, his friend John Cam Hobhouse was in Paris to witness the English troops taking possession of the gates. The event provoked the following reflections:

England, who made the exception to the eighth article of the treaty of March 25 in favour of the rights of the French nation to choose their own monarch, now decides that France is to be treated as a conquered nation. The Duke of Wellington behaves with the utmost moderation, the friends of freedom cherish every hope. Lord Castlereagh arrives; the curtain rises at once, and the royal personages appear unmasked. Mufling is made Governor of Paris by Blucher and Wellington, and tells the capital so in a proclamation couched in terms of unrelenting severity. By the side of this appear the addresses of the returning tyrant to his people, denouncing vengeance and restoring at one stroke of the pen the corrupt authorities which vanished on March 20.¹

And I shall be delighted to learn who, Save you and yours, have gained by Waterloo?

Byron, Don Juan (IX, 4)