I read this in a silly voice (which ended up veering from the Princess Bride, to David Attenborough to Cockney. I never could hold an accent.) But the text is below. Note, there are spoilers for A Sword for Wellington, but perhaps not really, given it’s basically a romance novel, which almost always require a Happy Ever After.
Essay: The New Matter of Britain
Since the final, great, defeat of the self-styled Emperor Napoleon, there has been much interest in the goings-on of the day, of the movements, the events leading up to the cataclysm and even what each personage wore during those fatal days. Even His Grace, the Duke of Wellington himself, has given over rooms in his stately home of Apsley House next to Hyde Park to the subject. Rooms are filled with gold plate, paintings of allies and comrades, and war relics of the battle of Waterloo, in addition to his other campaigns, and if one is worthy enough to be invited to his annual banquet on that grave anniversary, they dine off plate gifted to His Grace for his part in this most magnificent endeavour.
The most fastidious of devotees to this final battle will know what both the French usurper and our beloved duke wore at the battle of Waterloo. It will come no surprise to them, as it might to some of our readers, that the sword His Grace bore upon that battlefield once belonged to Napoleon himself, although none can say how Wellington came by this particular sword.
Others yet say His Grace wore a simple British cavalry sword, and this indeed is on display amongst the other relics and medals of the Duke’s. His Grace and his staff insist that it was nothing less than a British sword upon the field that day.
Recently, a novel published and circulated among the family and friends of Mrs. Trevisan has cast a great cloud of doubt upon this accepted version of history. In fact, according to Mrs. Trevisan, her parents had a hand in delivering that most British of swords, the one that the legendary King Arthur bore into countless battles against the Anglo-Saxon, uniting the nation for the first time, Excalibur itself.
Published as that most lowest form of literature, the romance novel, “A Sword for Wellington” is no mere trifle and the author is not shy at all about spelling out the real truth for us in the title. Her story details how her parents brought a sword once held by King Arthur to the Duke of Wellington, on the eve of the battle of Waterloo, falling in love and thwarting French assassin along the way, and while His Grace, via his secretary, insists that the British cavalry sword he still possesses was the one borne at Waterloo, one has to wonder at the authoress daring to make such an easily contradicted statement. Is she revealing a hidden truth, that it was not sheer luck that Wellington prevailed but that the hand of King Arthur delivered us again?
In my efforts to investigate this Great Matter of Britain, I have corresponded with many in His Grace’s circle, and have included in my inquiries both of Mrs. Trevisan’s parents as well as those who were in Brussels at the time. In addition, I have examined both the Arthurian and the Welsh literature.
Let us start then at the beginning with the origins of King Arthur’s sword. The tales vary, as of course they must, being told and retold over many centuries before at last being committed to paper. The two main versions, of course every man of literary merit knows, they being, first, the sword found in the stone, second, the sword given to him by a Lady of the Lake and returned to her upon Arthur’s death.
I would argue that these stories are in fact one and the same, for it is through the stones that Excalibur is delivered into the modern world of 1814 and it is via a votive of the sacred priestesses who minister at a certain lake that the sword is brought forth; a sword meant for the reincarnation of King Arthur and to save Britain from being conquered anew. Of course, it was thus meant for the man who had already saved England once from such a fate: Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington. His mother had the foresight to name this esteemed gentleman after the past king.
The novel refers to the sword as Excalibur but rarely, using an older, Welsh name for it: Caledfwlch. Assuredly more of a mouthful, this name can be found in the ancient story “Culwch and Olwen”, which in turn can be found in Lady Charlotte Guest’s most recent translation of “The Mabinogion”, which she completed and published in 1845, although of course, scholars have been aware of this tale for quite some time in its original language. In this Welsh tale, this sword is greatly prized by King Arthur. Thus should we even dare to be surprised that the authoress’ Christian name is none other than Olwen?
In the stories about King Arthur since, he, or his champion, used this sword and remained undefeated until the final battle. Even His Grace has been heard to utter many a time about the Battle of Waterloo how it was “the nearest run thing” as one would expect from such a conflict that has changed the face of Europe for the better. Could you imagine Europe today under the monolithic tyranny of Napoleon? It could have become a state to everyone’s detriment.
With this knowledge in hand, I sought modern-day evidence that such a sword had passed into the Duke of Wellington’s hands. Time and time again, I have been informed that it was naught but a fabrication, a fiction, to dramatise the romance fancifully told by Mrs. Trevisan. Even her own father denied any knowledge of the sword, stating emphatically that his wife came from a very poor village in the far north west of Wales, and that their daughter included some of the old bedtime stories into her work in order to honour her mother’s cultural legacy.
Yet I have been entirely unable to find any independent telling of anyone traveling through the ancient stone circles to a different time period in any of the Welsh literature. Nothing exists in the Scots stories either. There is much about the mode of sea travel, and of altar stones for sacrifices, yet not a single legend details using the old stone circles to travel to other times. The Irish and English have fairy tales of spending one night in the fairy lands and returning home a year later. Time moves differently in Fairy. Perhaps these ancients traveled not to another land, but to the same land in a different century and were thus unable to return. Would not our ancestors find our time one of unimaginable luxury, riches, and one of general peacetime?
Has Mrs. Devenish (the authoress’ mother) come from a village whose stories have since been lost in the last few decades, or are her supposed tales, indeed, fact? I have not, in fact, been able to determine exactly which village Mrs. Devenish hails from, with no family member willing to share the details, perhaps from embarrassment, and the great Gifting emptying so many of our villages for the betterment of greater production..
Through my correspondence with the many who resided in Brussels in the months leading up to the Battle of Waterloo, I verified Mrs. Devenish’s presence in that capitol, as well as the tale regarding her engaging in a street fight. Ladies remember her as a taciturn, scowling woman, and recalled the fight as one that catapulted her to notoriety, a reputation that did not subside when she danced three times with Sir Hugh Devenish at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo.
Of my other correspondents, one almost mortally wounded at the battle, who begged off from being named in my work, although I possess the receipts in his lordship’s own hand, remembers Sir Hugh being witless for the then-girl and that they, in the company of the woman the entire world now knows as Queen Eidothea of the Dreigiau Môr, met with the Duke of Wellington the day before the Battle of Waterloo began and later again that year in Paris. It was not that long ago that the dreigiau môr, the sea dragons, were unknown to us, barely recognised even as creatures of myth. In Mrs. Trevisan’s novel, sea dragons mingle with humans, long before the world knew of them. My requests to the Dreigiau Môr Court has gone unanswered.
I have been offered further documentary evidence regarding the dreigiau môr connexion, which I have yet to receive, that will shed light upon the fact that Arthur’s sword is indeed among us at this present time. When I have digested it, I will update my findings accordingly.
Given the preponderance of evidence in both the literature and in the various recollections, it is obvious that the sword the Duke of Wellington bore at the Battle of Waterloo is the same that belonged to King Arthur, If this is indeed the case, the sword belongs not in aging Wellesley hands but with the crown jewels in the Tower of London, for who knows when Britain may once again need it in some future darkest hour?
Respectfully submitted, William Widcombe, Esq. Chipping Combe
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