 Waterloo was the last battle in a twenty-three year cycle of wars that began with the outbreak of the French Revolution and the intervention of the European powers. Essentially it was the battle that restored Europe to balance and stability and set the pattern that would endure for most of the rest of the nineteenth century. So it served Britain's interests by stabilizing Europe, by removing the French from the Great Invasion ports of northern Belgium, Ostensie, Brugge, Antwerp, and ensuring that Britain's intervention in Europe from that point on was relatively limited right down to 1914. It brought Britain a century of very cheap security, a century in which Britain becomes the greatest power in the world. The Battle of Waterloo begins a year earlier in April, 1814, when Napoleon abdicates. His armies have been defeated, his generals have abandoned him, even the French people have given up on dreams of glory and large-scale bloodshed. Napoleon is then sent off to the island of Elba, just off the Italian coast, where he becomes the emperor of a very small island. Within twelve months he's back in France, he's overthrown the Bourbon monarchy, he's raised a fresh army. Napoleon has recovered all of his glory, his troops have rejoined him, the Eagles are up, everybody's up for a fight. The French seem to have learned nothing in twenty-two years, if you follow Napoleon you will all die. Napoleon decides that he will attack into Belgium, which the British have created specifically to keep the French out of the low countries. There he's going to meet the Duke of Wellington, who is the British minister at the Congress of Vienna, and is also the man planning the defence of Belgium against a French attack. So Wellington is ready for this. He's also going to meet the army of Prussia, the other major European power that's in the front line against Napoleon. So Napoleon's plan is very simple. He will find the Prussian army, he will smash them, he will find the British army, he will smash them, and he will then hope that the Austrians and the Russians will decide that we must just leave him alone. The problem is Napoleon has been declared a common criminal, an outlaw. He is not recognised by any other European state as a legitimate ruler. Therefore the powers of Europe will overthrow him. The question is how long it will take, and on what battlefield they will do that. Waterloo is really a campaign in which we see a series of battles over five days. Their engagements at Lignin, Qatar, Brow and the Prussian and British armies first face the French. So the French army is split. In the first engagement the British face a small French force, while the Prussians are hit by the main French army, and then at Waterloo it's the main French army against the British, and the Prussians coming in from the flank to join the battle late in the day and ensure that the British defensive victory is turned into a complete rout, and the French are overwhelmed. Wellington, a man with a taste for drama, said it was a close-run thing. It was too close for comfort as far as he was concerned, and he wasn't wrong. The French brought up a lot of artillery, they had excellent infantry, cavalry, and had they handled their forces with more skill they would have come close to winning the battle. But Wellington himself was a master of the defensive battle. He didn't give the French any opportunity to turn his flank or to drive through the centre of his position. He held his ground, he kept his men under cover as far as possible, and each successive wave of French attacks was beaten off. Until by the end the French had nothing left, and when Napoleon's elite troops, the old guard who were the finest troops in the world, were caught in the flank and driven off the field, the whole thing collapsed in a rout, and the French immediately decided someone had betrayed them. It was Napoleon, and he was leaving the field in a carriage. Napoleon, knowing that as a common criminal he stood to be hung on the field by the Prussians who had a taste for such things, got in his carriage and legged it to Paris. He realised when he got to Paris nobody was going to back and defeated Napoleon. He then wandered down to Bordeaux and he boarded a British warship, HMS Bellarophon, a battleship that had fought in all the great battles of the war at sea. And there he told the captain, Sir Frederick Maitland, you know what he said, but for you people I would have been emperor of the world. He said, but wherever there is enough water to float a boat upon, I'm sure to find you in my way. And that ultimately is Napoleon's tragedy. He never got out of Europe. All of his great dreams of following his hero Alexander the Great through Persia to India evaporated at the Battle of the Nile. Ultimately he was beaten by Britain, by Nelson and by Wellington. The problem for Wellington is that by now he's already a duke. There is no further promotion available, but he does get a lot of money which he uses to buy a great family estate, which is still the residence of the dukes of Wellington. And he then goes into politics and government. He is essentially the founding father of this college. He is the prime minister. He fights a duel over King's College London with a disgruntled peer. And he hangs on the wall of our council room to remind us that we have a really great founder, a man who saved Europe and restored the balance of the world and left his country a rather better place than he found it. Today the Battle of Waterloo is remembered in very different ways. If you go to the battlefield you would swear that Napoleon had won. The battlefield is all about Napoleon. Wellington hardly appears and the Prussians are almost absent. If you're British it means that the British won the Napoleonic Wars, which is entirely untrue. Everybody else joined in too. The British were only there at the end. If you're French it reminds you that pursuing glory is madness. And at the moment the Germans are very keen not to talk about it because Germany is a very, very unmilitary state. And so the Germans really didn't want to go to Waterloo for the 200th anniversary to even talk about this battle. A hundred years before, in 1913, at the real decisive battle of the Napoleonic Wars, the anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig, the Germans staged a huge parade, a mass military demonstration, and re-fought the battle. To remind the French they'd beaten them. So a hundred years has changed a lot. The bombastic, imperial, Hohenzollern might of 1913 has been replaced by an altogether more peace-loving Germany. So Waterloo has many meanings. And of course here in central London we have Waterloo Station and Waterloo Bridge. And these are the things that connect the two halves of King's College. The North Bank and the South Bank are linked by Waterloo Bridge. A bridge built to celebrate the victory. A railway station named in honour of the victory. And until recently the place where the Euro-star ended, you've got on a gare du noir, you've got off at Waterloo just in case you were in any doubt where you'd arrived. Of course the French have the gare de Austerlitz to annoy the Austrians. So it's a fairly universal currency. Today Waterloo Station has a memorial not to the Great Battle of 1815, but to those who lost their lives in the First World War. And as you walk into the grand entrance right behind me you'll see the list of all of the names of the railwaymen who joined the war effort and never came home. So it's a memory not just of one battle and one war, but of many wars. It's a way of remembering the sacrifice that it's taken to keep Europe peaceful, stable and balanced through the long term. And that ultimately has been Britain's contribution to Europe. Not great wars of conquest, but great wars of stability, preserving the balance and the status quo against powers bent on European domination, be they Napoleon, the Kaiser, Hitler. That is Britain's role in Europe. It's the balancing agent that keeps everything stable.