Jean Victor Constant de Rebecque or Jean Victor de Constant Rebecque (22 September 1773 – 12 June 1850) was a Swiss mercenary and member of the house of Constant de Rebecque who distinguished himself in Dutch service. As chief of staff of the Netherlands Mobile Army, he countermanded the order of the Duke of Wellington to evacuate Dutch troops from Quatre Bras on the eve of the Battle of Quatre Bras, thereby preventing Marshal Michel Ney from occupying that strategic crossroads.
Biography
Family
Rebecque was the son of Samuel Constant de Rebecque (1729–1800) and his second wife Louise Cathérine Gallatin (1736–1814). The father was, like the grandfather Samuel Constant de Rebecque (1676–1782) (who reached the rank of lieutenant-general), a Swiss officer in the service of the Dutch Republic. A nephew (not a brother as sometimes erroneously stated) was Benjamin Constant. Jean Victor de Constant Rebecque married Isabella Catharina Anna Jacoba baroness van Lynden (1768–1836) in Braunschweig on 29 April 1798.Recueil historique, généalogique, chronologique et nobiliaire des maisons et ...
They had children: Victor, (Customary Marquis) baron De Constant Rebecque (1803-1858). A colonel in the Royal Netherlands Army, decorated with the Military Order of William. Aide-de-Camp to Prince Alexander of The Netherlands, King William II and King William III. Charles baron De Constant Rebecque (1805-1870). An officer in the Royal Netherlands Army, decorated with the Military Order of William. Chamberlain to William II and King William III, Secretary of the Dutch Council of State. Guillaume baron De Constant Rebecque (1807-1862). An officer in the Royal Netherlands Navy. Louise baroness De Constant Rebecque (1809-1852), who married Sylvius Reichsgraf Von Pückler
Early career Rebecque entered the service of France as a sous-lieutenant in a regiment of Swiss Guards in 1788. He started a journal that year that he faithfully kept every day of the rest of his life, thereby providing useful source material to historians. During the Insurrection of 10 August 1792 at the Tuileries Palace his regiment was massacred by French revolutionaries, but he escaped with his life. He returned to Switzerland where he was in military service until he (like his ancestors before him) entered the service of the Dutch Republic in 1793 in the regiment of Prince Frederick (a younger son of stadtholder William V, Prince of Orange). After the fall of the Republic, and the proclamation of the Batavian Republic he first entered British service (1795–1798) and subsequently Prussian service (1798–1811). During that Prussian service from 1805 he tutored the future William II of the Netherlands in military science and helped him pass his exams as a Prussian officer. When William started his studies at Oxford University he accompanied the young prince there and obtained a doctorate honoris causa from Oxford himself in 1811.
William was next appointed aide-de-camp of the Duke of Wellington during the Peninsular War and Rebecque likewise entered British service again on 12 May 1811 as a major, and participated in every battle the Duke (and William) fought there, distinguishing himself at the Battle of Vittoria.
When William, and his father William I of the Netherlands, returned to the Netherlands in November 1813, Rebecque was appointed a lieutenant-colonel in the Orange-Nassau Legion. He advanced very rapidly after that: colonel and aide-de-camp of the Sovereign Prince on 31 December 1813, and Quarter-master-general on 15 January 1814. He took part in the Siege of Bergen op Zoom (1814), and then was promoted to major-general on 30 November 1814.
Rebecque played a very prominent role in the organization from scratch of the armed forces of the Kingdom of the United Netherlands in 1813–1815. On 11 April 1814 he was appointed chief of staff of the new Netherlands Mobile Army that was then formed to besiege the French in Antwerp. In July 1814 he was appointed in a commission that was charged with the formation of a combined Dutch-Belgian army. He played a leading role in that commission. Next he helped Prince Frederick of the Netherlands found the headquarters of the Netherlands Mobile Army, that was to play such an important part in the Waterloo Campaign, on 9 April 1815.
Probably because many Dutch officers (like generals Chassé and Trip) had served in the French Grande Armée this new army was organized along the lines of the French army. In any case its general staff took Marshal Berthier's famous état-major-général as a model, and not the British system. Nevertheless, because Rebecque had long served as a staff officer in Wellington's army, he was well acquainted with British procedures, and knew his opposite numbers personally.
Quatre Bras and Waterloo
After Napoleon Bonaparte escaped from Elba and quickly overthrew the restored Bourbon monarchy in March 1815, he quickly formed Army of the North, with the help of veterans like Anne-François Mellinet (who organized the Jeune Garde), though he had to do without Marshals Berthier and Murat for various reasons. Threatened by this military build-up the Great Powers declared war on Napoleon personally and started to prepare for the inevitable showdown. The Sovereign Prince of the Netherlands also brought his plans for forming his Kingdom of the United Netherlands forward and proclaimed himself king on 16 March 1815 (see Eight Articles of London). Incidentally, this allowed him to give up his title of Prince of Orange and bestow it upon his eldest son as a courtesy title. That eldest son was now also put in charge of the new Netherlands Mobile Army, though at the same time the Duke of Wellington was appointed a field-marshal in the Dutch army. The arrangement was to be that Wellington would command the combined Anglo-allied army that was now assembling in the "Belgian" part of the United Netherlands, but that the Prince of Orange would be in charge of the Belgian-Dutch troops (with his younger brother Frederick nominally commanding a corps). Only Wellington and his chief of staff Lord Hill would be able to give direct orders to the Belgian/Dutch troops, but in practice Wellington always went "through channels" and conveyed his orders to the Belgian/Dutch units via the Prince of Orange.
Beside the Anglo-allied army there also was still a Prussian army under field-marshal Prince Blücher in the Belgian Netherlands, as this part of the country formally still was a Coalition military governorate-general (with king William as its governor-general). The two armies were cantoned over a wide area, with the Prussians taking the south-eastern part, and the Anglo-allies the north-western part. Napoleon strategy was to exploit the dispersal of the two encamped armies by thrusting his Army of the North into the demarcation line between the two armies and by moving quickly to defeat each army in turn (as his Army of the North was larger than each of the Coalition armies separately). For this to succeed he needed the element of surprise, because if the Coalition allies would have known his exact intentions, and would have been able to react in time, they could of course have combined their armies in time and blocked his purpose.
Beside the element of surprise the geo-strategical shape of the theatre of war was also important. The terrain in south-eastern Belgium, where the hilly Ardennes are located, makes only a few invasion routes feasible. Besides, the number of highways was limited in 1815, and this further limited the movements of the opposing armies. Belgium has always been an important theatre of war in the course of the centuries, but in 1815 it had been peaceful since the victory of the French revolutionary armies in 1794, and most generals involved had last campaigned in the country when they were young officers, if at all. Strategic information was therefore at a premium.
Wellington himself had traversed the country on his way to Paris in 1814 and he had at that occasion scouted the area around Waterloo and was aware of its advantages as a battlefield in case Brussels was to be defended. He also commissioned one of his staff officers to survey the area and to assess its strategic choke points. One of those points was the crossroads of the Charleroi-Brussels road and the Nivelles-Namur road at Quatre Bras. It was generally recognized that the first road would be the prime venue for the French to reach Brussels, and the second one was indispensable for maintaining communications between the two Coalition armies. For that reason occupying the crossroads was essential; whichever army controlled it would have a decisive strategic advantage. For that reason Rebecque, as chief of staff of the Netherlands army ordered the commander of the Netherlands 2nd division, De Perponcher to secure it at all times on 6 May 1815.
However, Napoleon achieved his strategic surprise, because of a certain reticence on the part of the Coalition allies: the Prussians and British had not declared war on France, just on Napoleon personally (a subtle, but important difference) and they, therefore, refrained from conducting cavalry reconnaissances across the French border. The Netherlands cavalry was not so constrained, and did reconnoitre the border area, but the three Netherlands cavalry brigades were too thin on the ground to cover the area thoroughly. When Napoleon, therefore, started his lightning offensive, this was not discovered before it was almost too late. He was already in Charleroi before the French were discovered and when news of this sudden appearance reached Wellington he still worried that this was just a feint, and that the true advance would come by way of Mons. Because of this possibility of being outflanked, and being cut off from the escape route to the coast, Wellington on the evening of 15 June decided to concentrate his army around Nivelles. His orders went out to all British troops directly, and to the Netherlands troops through the intermediary of the Prince of Orange and his staff (as described above).
These orders to the 2nd Brigade, 2nd Netherlands Division under major-general Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, at Quatre Bras at the time, would have evacuated this essential strategic point. As Saxe-Weimar was aware of the oncoming French because he heard firing from the vicinity of Frasnes, and saw the alarm beacons lighted, the order to evacuate surprised him. He alerted the divisional commander, De Perponcher, who immediately put the other brigade of his division (then at Nivelles) on alert, and sent a staff officer, captain De Gargen, to the Netherlands headquarters at Braine-le-Comte.
Here, Rebecque (on the strength of De Gargen's report), in consultation with De Perponcher, decided to countermand Wellington's order, and instead ordered De Perponcher to reinforce Saxe-Weimar immediately with the 1st Brigade, 2nd Netherlands Division, under major-general Willem Frederik van Bylandt. He immediately reported this decision to the Prince of Orange in Brussels, who informed Wellington of it at the famous ball of the Duchess of Richmond. A lesser man might have just sent a suggestion to Wellington, meanwhile letting the order stand. Wellington was not known for looking kindly upon having his orders disregarded, let alone countermanded, as Rebecque must have been well aware, as one of Wellington's former staff officers. He therefore displayed that rare commodity: moral courage.