WAITE Beating Napoleon at Eton 407 BEATING NAPOLEON AT ETON VIOLENCE, SPORT AND MANLINESS IN ENGLAND’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS, 1783–1815 Kevin Waite University of Pennsylvania ABSTRACT Despite the popular aphorism that ‘the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton’, historians have been slow to appreciate the value Georgian elites vested in their public schools and public school sport. In fact, the stereotype of these schools as anarchic and pedagogically insignificant still endures. I argue that the schools of this period came to enjoy a growing popularity precisely because of their rough nature. Contemporaries praised the violence of both the dormitories and the playing fields as productive of vigorous future leaders, capable of defending Britain in a world at war. Such rhetoric, I argue, anticipated the late Victorian cults of sport and manliness. Keywords: education, public school, masculinity, gender, boxing As revolution came to a close in the former American colonies, rebellion erupted at Eton College. The cause of the scholastic clash was a typical one in public schools of the period. Protesting Dr Jonathan Davies’s refusal to relax discipline, a horde of adolescent malcontents drove their headmaster out of the school. Left in possession of the college, they proceeded to break the school’s many windows, including those in the headmaster’s chambers, where they also destroyed Davies’s papers and vandalized his furniture. In a symbolic gesture of defiance, the boys removed and dismantled the block on which floggings took place, thereby achieving the rebellion’s coupdegrâce and marking a victory over that notorious instrument of school discipline. 1 Such wild episodes were hardly unique to Eton, however. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries none of the major English public schools escaped a student uprising of some sort, a number of which left considerable destruction in their wake. The headmaster at Rugby even had to call in a battalion of soldiers after a band of mutinous pupils made a vast bonfire of his personal library and school furniture in a 1797 rebellion. 2 These and other chaotic scenes prompted an older generation of historians to brand this period in English public education as a time of incorrigible misrule – which has proved an enduring stereotype. Their histories conventionally present the later Georgian era as anarchic and savage, marked by educational mediocrity and rude conditions. This disorderly stage gradually gives way, in these accounts, to CulturalandSocialHistory, Volume 11, Issue 3, pp. 407–424 © The Social History Society 2014 DOI 10.2752/147800414X13983595303390 Address for correspondence: Kevin Waite, Department of History, School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, College Hall 208, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6379, USA. E-mail: kwaite@sas. upenn.edu