Their dark materials

Laws and sausages, we know, are better not seen in the making; and neither are ‘black ops’. Waterloo may have been won on the playing fields of Eton, and Trafalgar on the dunes near Burnham Thorpe, but Britain’s secret war against Napoleon was won in less wholesome places. ‘This is a book about propaganda, spying and covert operations… a very modern story of secret committees, slush funds, assassination,’ writes Tim Clayton, whose Waterloo: Four Days that Changed Europe’s Destiny was by far the most scholarly of the many volumes produced for the bicentenary. And what an astonishing story it all is, alternately inspiring and disturbing, a challenging addition to the Napoleonic canon.

‘Propaganda’ only gained a bad name during the Revolution and its wars, having thitherto been simply a benign neologism: Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, an organ of the papacy for the propagation of the Faith. But if French propaganda was less than truthful, says Clayton, the British variety was thoroughly mendacious. It had to be, as the British public had at first welcomed the post-absolute monarchical constitution emerging in France, Charles James Fox and the Whigs particularly — at least until the insatiable guillotine started to make them queasy. After all, hadn’t we been fighting one Bourbon king or another for 100 years?

‘British propaganda made the central issue the question of whether or not Napoleon was really a villain,’ says Clayton. Its object was to deflect attention from what the British themselves were up to: the silencing of opposition at home, and direct action abroad.