Battle of Waterloo and withdrew in good order—though at the cost of 33,000 French troops that never reached the Waterloo battlefield. Wellington sent describing the battle to England on 19 June 1815; it arrived in London on 21 June 1815 and was published as a "London Gazette Extraordinary" on 22 June. Wellington, Blücher and other Coalition forces advanced upon Paris. Napoleon announced his second abdication on 24 June 1815. In the final skirmish of the Napoleonic Wars, Marshal Davout, Napoleon's minister of war, was defeated by Blücher at Issy on 3 July 1815. Allegedly, Napoleon tried to escape to North America, but the
The Field of Waterloo Critical Review" judged it as "absolutely the poorest, dullest, least interesting composition that has hitherto issued from the author of "Rokeby". Even the gazette of the battle contains more information, and the style of the poem is very little, if at all, superior to that of Marshal Wellington's modest dispatches." The poor reception of the poem led to widespread joking about Sir Walter Scott like Napoleon meeting his greatest defeat at Waterloo, as in the widely circulated squib attributed to Lord Erskine: The Field of Waterloo The Field of Waterloo is a poem by Sir Walter Scott, written and published