Witnessing Waterloo: 24 Hours, 48 Lives, A World Forever Changed

Nobody who had not lived through that first heady summer of 1814, insisted the painter Benjamin Haydon, could have any inkling of what it was like to feel a whole country’s exhilarating sense of liberation. For the first time since the phoney peace of 1802, ordinary men and women had been able to travel abroad again, and as naval and Peninsular officers married, and their wives got pregnant and the country’s women caught up with fashions, and British artists saw Old Masters they had known only from prints, Britain looked forward to a world un-shadowed by war. ‘All the town was out to see them,’1 the great Victorian engineer, James Nasmyth – just a lad at the time – recalled of the magical night when the whole city of Edinburgh, generous in victory to a beaten foe, had turned out to watch the passage of French prisoners from the castle down to their transports at Leith; ‘they passed in military procession through the principal streets, singing as they marched along their revolutionary airs, “Ça Ira” and “The Marseillaise.” The wild enthusiasm of these haggard-looking men, lit up by torchlight and accompanied by the cheers of the dense crowd who lined the streets and filled the windows, made an impression on my mind that I can never forget.’

In the year since then peace had delivered on few of the hopes of Cockburn and his fellow liberals – the brilliant Summer of Sovereigns of 1814, when London had been en fête for the Emperor of Russia and crowds pulled Blücher’s carriage through its streets, was already a fading memory – but to a great swathe of the country peace at any price was better than more death, taxation and hardship. ‘We are at the moment smarting under an almost intolerable load of taxation, incurred in fighting other peoples’ battles and in dictating to other nations whether they shall have for their ruler King Stork or King Log,’ the Liverpool Mercury had protested bitterly when the first news of Bonaparte’s escape reached England. ‘Such idle squabbles have deeply injured our moral character, almost exhausted our national resources; and reduced a great portion of our population to a state of ignominy or dependency … To enter into a new war, under such circumstances, must entail upon our country a complication of evils, which cannot be thought of by the philanthropist or the patriot, without the most melancholy forebodings.’

It was perhaps predictable enough that Liverpool merchants, who had scarcely finished toasting the end of hostilities with America, were against another war, but what astonished George Ticknor, an engaging and well-connected young New Englander in Britain for the first time, was the breadth and depth of opposition. He had been taken up in Liverpool by the littérateur and philanthropist William Roscoe, and armed with introductions had made his leisurely way down to London via the Hatton parsonage where the man known as the ‘Whig Johnson’ – the redoubtable classical scholar and pedagogue Dr Samuel Parr – left him in no doubt that it was not just mercantile Liverpool that was against the war. ‘I am for Napoleon versus the pilferers of his pensions and the kidnappers of his person,’ Parr declared, ‘for the army and people of France versus any and every foreign power, which should presume to oppose their sacred right to choose their own sovereign – for brave men versus assassins – for wise men versus blundering monsters – for insurgents in one country versus the confederate enemies of freedom and independence in all countries – for the countless many versus the worthless few – and finally, for a reasonable peace versus unnecessary, unjust and inhuman war.’

For all the rhetorical flourishes, here was the genuine voice of old Whiggery, and ranged alongside Parr was a rainbow coalition that reached from the usual radical suspects at one end to all those children of the Romantic age clinging on to a hero-worship that no crime, betrayal or excess of Bonaparte’s could ever quite eradicate. From London’s clubs to the Royal Academy, from the pages of The Examiner and the columns of The Times to private letters, the debate raged on – it was a war against Liberty, it was a war against Tyranny, it was a Tory war, it was a Necessary war, it was a war for Autocracy against Humanity, it was a war for Christianity against Barbarism – and neither side had any monopoly on the violence of its opinions. For every William Godwin preaching the ‘extirpation’ of the allied soldiers, there was a Wordsworth damning ‘That soul of Evil … from Hell let loose’; for every vinegary old radical like William Blake’s wife demanding the head of poor, mad King George or Byron looking forward to seeing Castlereagh’s adorning a French pike, there were loyal theatre audiences ready to cheer anything remotely royalist to the rafters.

In spite of all the white noise of angry protest in Parliament and in the liberal and radical press, there was a groundswell of patriotic support for the war for which a deeply unpopular government and a despised Prince Regent had only the French to thank. Through the spring of 1815 there had been violent and widespread rioting over the imposition of Corn Laws, but there was no race quite like the French – ‘vain, insolent, shallow … tender without heart, pale, fierce, and elegant in their looks, depraved, lecherous, and blasphemous in their natures!’– and no enemy like Boney to make John Bull forget the price of bread or the weight of his taxes and roll up his sleeves for another fight.

There had never been any doubt, either, in the minds of Lord Liverpool’s Tory government that they would have to fight, and as Britain moved smoothly on to a war footing, and soldiers lobbied for employment and made their wills, and cheering crowds waved goodbye to transports carrying troops to Belgium, and the borders of France were closed and intelligence dried up, the country steeled itself against the coming storm. Since the first battles of the 1790s, parents and wives had lived in permanent dread of the news the Gazettes might bring them, and now again they found themselves trapped in that old, familiar limbo of apprehension and suspense, fighting over the last newspaper or pushing their way through the agitated scrums around booksellers to read the latest placard pasted in the windows.

There would not have been a town in Britain that was not sending its soldiers to Belgium during those weeks of May and early June, hardly a household that was not holding its breath, because never since the Armada had the hopes and fears of the whole country hung on the outcome of one event in the way that they did on the eve of Waterloo. At the height of French invasion scares eleven years earlier the whole country had been caught up in the demands of total war, but these early summer days in 1815 were different again from anything that the country had known, different in immediacy, different in the fissures revealed in society, and different, above all, in that sense of suspended time – William Wilberforce’s ‘fearful interval’ – during which a schizophrenic nation, one face pointed towards Belgium and the other hell-bent on its ordinary pleasures, waited for the first news that hostilities had commenced.

It was on one such day in the middle of June, a Saturday that had seemed like any other that month, at some time after ten in the evening that a middle-aged man might have been seen walking down Chancery Lane in the direction of the Thames. At the bottom of the lane he crossed over to the south side of Fleet Street, and pushing his way through a small wicket gate in an archway beneath a big painted sign for the ‘Waxworks’ paused at the doorway of an old, brick-built terrace house on the right-hand side of Inner Temple Lane.

After the brightness and noise of Fleet Street, there would have been something almost palpable in the silence of the Temple, as if the City itself held its breath, listening to the muffled sounds of lives that went unheard or unnoticed on the other side of Temple Gate. Fifty yards to the west the Coalhole Tavern would be steeling itself against the raucous arrival of the actor Edmund Kean’s ‘Wolf Club’, but for the moment the Inns of Court was a world apart, the still centre of a London that never slept, hidden away between the teeming flow of river life to the south and the ‘bustle and wickedness’ of Covent Garden to the north; between the political and social heartland of Westminster to the west and the City to the east.

It would have been odd if anyone had noticed Henry Crabb Robinson – with his long plain face, boxer’s nose and receding hairline there was nothing remarkable about him – but if Robinson was Everyman he also knew everyone and in that lay his solitary claim to fame. As a young man he had shared in the political excitement of the 1790s until time and necessity had sobered him, and at the age of forty-five he was a jobbing barrister on the Norfolk circuit of no particular ambition, a Boswell manqué with nothing of his genius or his vices; a decent, good-natured, worthy, middle-aged bachelor on the long, slow downhill road from youthful, Godwinian radicalism to respectable, philanthropic, Victorian liberalism.

The old red-brick terrace that dated back to the days of the Commonwealth was rich in the kind of literary associations Robinson loved – Dr Johnson had lived at No 1 when he had first come down to London, Boswell in a typical act of homage at No 2 – and for the last six years Inner Temple Lane had been the home of Charles Lamb and his sister Mary. As a young boy Charles had fetched the family’s water from the pump in the gloomy garden at the back of the house, and if the water only came with brandy these days, Hare Court was still as near to a place of childhood safety as anywhere in their haunted, restless lives that the Lambs would ever know.

Lamb loved the London that lay just the other side of the Temple Gate – its streets and playhouses, its churches and markets, its lighted shops and pretty milliners, its drunken bucks, tradesmen, whores and beggars, its coffee houses, bookstalls and print shops, its scuffles and pickpockets, even ‘the very dirt and mud’ – but he needed Hare Court and the shelter of the Temple precinct. In his younger days he had liked to fancy himself a Londoner in the robust eighteenth-century mould of a Johnson or Boswell, but Lamb was a spectator at the feast rather than a participant, a connoisseur and collector of the city’s sights and sounds, happiest and most secure when he could pull up the drawbridge and, surrounded by his friends and his mildewed books and his old furniture and the comforting ghosts of childhood, listen for the distant voice of the watchman or the muffled cry of ‘Fire’.

With its three dusty elms and dusty sparrows and graveyard gloom, situated just yards away from his beloved Fleet Street, Hare Court was not just Lamb’s metropolitan ideal but his ideal of the countryside too. From their old lodgings in King’s Bench Walk there had been a distant view across the Thames to the Surrey Hills, and save for the Temple Gardens or a walk along London’s New River, that was as close as the most doggedly un-romantic of all the Romantics liked ‘dead Nature’ to come. ‘I don’t much care if I never see a mountain in my life,’ he had written to Wordsworth fifteen years earlier, fending off an invitation to join him and his sister Dorothy for a holiday in the Lakes. ‘Your sun and moon and skies and hills and lakes affect me no more … than as a gilded room with tapestry and tapers, where I might live with handsome visible objects. I consider the clouds above me but as a roof, beautifully painted but unable to satisfy the mind … My attachments are all local, purely local … The rooms where I was born, the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a bookcase which has followed me about (like a faithful dog, only exceeding him in knowledge), wherever I have moved, old chairs, old tables, streets, squares, where I have sunned myself, my old school – these are my mistresses.’

For the last forty-five years this had been the whole circumference of Lamb’s world – the Temple, Christ’s Hospital, Bishopsgate, the clerks’ office in the East India Company – and the only world he had ever wanted. From time to time he and his sister Mary would be forced to move a few hundred yards in one direction or another, but it was only here among the clerks and Benchers of the Temple, in the prelapsarian world of their childhoods, that he was at home and as safe as he could ever be from the horror that for the last twenty years had shadowed the quiet, external tenor of their lives.

The horror had begun one Thursday afternoon in September in 1796, as a young seamstress was preparing dinner for her family in their cramped Holborn rooms just to the north of the Temple. For some reason that the coroner’s court could only guess at, the girl had suddenly seized a knife that was lying on the table, and baulked of killing her child apprentice, had turned on her bedridden mother and savagely stabbed her through the heart before the child’s screams could bring their landlord. ‘It seems the young lady had once before, in her earlier years, deranged, from the harassing fatigues of too much business,’ the Morning Chronicle reported; ‘as her carriage towards her mother was ever affectionate in the extreme, it is believed that in the increased attentiveness, which her parents’ infirmities called for by day and night, is to be attributed the present insanity of this ill-fated young woman.’

The fragile and harassed young woman was Mary, the bout of madness lasted only days – the coroner’s court found her insane but released her to her brother’s care – and for almost two decades that had been his life. Every few years rumours of their old tragedy would surface and the Lambs would be forced to shift their lodgings, but for nineteen heroic years Charles Lamb had fought to keep the world and his own incipient madness at bay, collaborating with Mary on her children’s stories and Tales, carrying her straitjacket for her on her sad, voluntary exiles to the Hoxton asylum whenever another attack threatened, and rising each day for thirty-three years to the drudgery of the East India Company accounts department to ensure that there would be a refuge to which she could return.

Over the years the loss and the perpetual anxiety for both Mary and his own mental state had taken its toll on Charles – it was there in the face, in the lines of suffering, the sadness in the smile, the misanthropic edge to his humour, the alcohol, the dark, unnerving depths that lay just beyond the bubbling shallows of his talk – but perhaps the strangest thing of all about Mary’s illness is that she never felt any guilt for what she had done. In the first days after the attack she had come to believe that a benevolent providence had ordained her mother’s death, and at some subconscious level madness remained almost as much a release as an affliction for her, an escape from the dull chrysalis of a spinsterish middle-age into a brilliant, fantasy past through which she glided with the abandoned licence of some dazzling court beauty of the age of Queen Anne and Congreve.

No one was more gentle or self-effacingly ‘feminine’ than Mary in her sane periods – the only woman of complete sense he had ever known, William Hazlitt claimed – and no one more brilliant or abandoned in her madness. It would have been less disquieting had their friends been able to see her insanity as something utterly unconnected with her ‘real’ personality, but nobody who heard her ravings – brilliant disjointed flashes of wit, sparkling jewels wrenched from their settings – could doubt that she was never so free as when she was in her straitjacket and never so restrained as when well.

Even for the most seasoned Lamb-watcher, in fact, it was hard to be sure who was looking after whom in Hare Court, or who had sacrificed most to create one, indivisible being out of the wreckage of their damaged lives, but no household in London ever attracted more loyal friends. For those who did not know the history of mental illness there was always something inexplicably odd about Charles, but for his discreet and inner circle of devotees, his defensive carapace of jokes and puns and antique flights of humour, eccentricities, reckless bursts of levity and bouts of helpless drunkenness – the ‘between the acts’ of his ‘distressful drama’ as he engagingly called them – only added a note of vulnerability that bound them even more protectively to him.

There were more glamorous, more distinguished, more powerful literary salons and coteries to be found in London – the room above Murray’s bookshop in Albemarle Street where, under the malignant Thomas Gifford, the Tory Quarterly was hatched; the great Whig Holland House set where Sydney Smith sang for his supper – but nowhere could you meet with such a mixed crowd of people as at Lamb’s. If Charles Lamb had any politics they were certainly on the liberal side of the debate, but that had never stopped his friends spanning the full gamut of political opinion, from Utopian revolutionaries-turned-Tories such as Southey, Coleridge or Wordsworth at one end of the spectrum, to the likes of Hazlitt, Godwin, Leigh Hunt and the radical journalist and satirist William Hone at the other.

The Lambs’ was also the place where the age of Johnson met the age of Dickens and Browning in its embryonic state, and for Crabb Robinson this was its great charm. Robinson knew that the two great ‘beasts’ in the Lamb menagerie would not be there tonight, but he was seeing Wordsworth for breakfast in the morning, and in some ways it was easier when he was not there, less high-minded and, somehow – Robinson hated to let anything cloud his admiration of the man he recognised as the greatest poet since Milton – less constrained by the presence and dues of genius.

Coleridge was away too, in Wiltshire, writing – or at least talking, as only Coleridge could talk – and Hunt would be busy at the Examiner’s office deep into the night; but so long as there could be one evening without Hazlitt and talk of Bonaparte, Robinson did not mind who else was there. He was painfully conscious that he got the worst of an argument with Hazlitt over the whist tables the last time they had met, and for a barrister it was doubly galling to be bested by a man ‘who was not just wrong but offensive in almost all he said’. ‘When pressed he does not deny what is bad in the character of Buonaparte,’ he had confided to his diary that night, part in anger, part in sadness at their parting of ways, ‘and yet he triumphs and rejoices in the late events. Hazlitt and myself once felt alike on politics, and now our hopes and fears are directly opposed. Hazlitt is angry with the friends of liberty for weakening their strength by going with the common foe against Buonaparte … Hazlitt says: “Let the enemy of old tyrannical governments triumph, I am glad, and I do not much care how the new government turns out … His hatred, and my fears, predominate and absorb all weaker impressions.”’

There seemed to be no one, in fact, that Hazlitt had not offended these last weeks – Charles Burney over the review of his sister Fanny’s latest novel, Wordsworth with his attack in last week’s Examiner, Hunt who had been forced to disown the article – but not even Hazlitt could spoil the pleasure Robinson always felt as he made his way up the steep flights of stairs to the Lambs’ chambers. He was probably too late now to take a hand of whist but after the recent hash he had made of his cards that was probably no bad thing, and it was only deep into the evening, when they were done with cards and the tables put away, and the drink had begun to do its work, that the place came fully alive in all its strange, unruly charm.

The Lambs’ Temple garret was a warren of small, shabby rooms under the roof and two sitting rooms on the third floor below. Charles Lamb had set aside the smaller of the rooms for a library so grimy that Robinson could never bring himself to go in, but the ‘state room’ would be looking as it always did for one of their soirées, with their old, petted servant Becky loading the sideboards with food and porter, while Mary glided in her quiet, measured way among the party and Charles – his hair, as black at forty as at twenty, the one grey and one brown eye already bright with fun and battle – sat like some diminutive, half-tipsy Quaker under the low, smoke-stained ceiling among his Hogarth prints, with his forbidden brandy and forbidden tobacco, and talked and stammered and joked and punned and drank to keep at bay the demons that no talk could hold off for ever.

Even by Charles Lamb’s standards, Robinson thought, they were an odd lot that evening: old Burney talking whist as if he had never watched Captain Cook being murdered or abandoned his wife for his sister; the poet Charles Lloyd, holding on to his sanity by the slenderest of threads; the ageing ’90s radical George Dyer, in the same rusty, threadbare suit of black, the same dirty yellowed wisp of muslin around his throat, the same trousers that stopped short of his ankles and the same battered shoes that he had been wearing when Lamb had first seen him in the library at Christ’s Hospital thirty years before. But as Robinson made his way among the old familiar faces there was one man he found himself watching with an interest that had more curiosity in it than he would have cared to admit.

The stranger had been buttonholed by Lamb, who was bent on securing his interest for another old Christ’s Hospital friend, an epileptic clerk in the Temple with a wife and four children who had fallen on hard times, but for once it was not Lamb who held Robinson’s interest. He knew who Basil Montagu was of course – everyone at the Bar did – and he knew the story of his mother’s killing, but to see him here in the flesh, the refined and almost effeminate image of his father, old Lord Sandwich, was like watching one of Lamb’s Hogarths come to life and Medmenham Monk turn Methodist preacher to denounce the vices of his youth.

Circumstances had combined, in fact, to make Basil Montagu – the illegitimate son of a notorious aristocratic rake and an opera singer murdered by a rival lover – more interesting than a reforming barrister with a specialist practice in bankruptcy had any business being. Montagu had been only nine when his mother’s clergyman-murderer was hanged at Tyburn in front of the biggest crowd since the clergyman-forger Dr Dodd, and his life since had been in miniature the movement of the age itself, an ascent – or descent, depending on your politics – from aristocratic bastard through Jacobin revolutionary and Coleridgean Romantic to Benthamite reformer, teetotalling vegetarianism and a gradualist faith in the slow triumph of liberal parliamentary reform.

As much as Byron or Prinny, or any of the more flamboyant arbiters of the age, Montagu embodied the spirit of a Regency England caught between a past it was trying to escape and a future that stubbornly refused to be born. There remained something of the ancien régime about him that Robinson did not quite like, but as Basil Montagu stood there among the smoke and fumes of Lamb’s chambers, talking confidently of the inevitable triumph of reform, exchanging tales of life on the Norfolk circuit and offering his copy of ‘Bentham on Evidence’, Robinson was looking at the past and listening to the future.

It would be a long night at the Lambs’, and as midnight approached and old Captain Burney – the apostolic link with the world of Johnson, Boswell, Reynolds and ‘The Club’ – talked cards, and Mary smoothed ruffled feathers, and Charles took poor, gullible George Dyer aside to explain in confidence that he had it on the best authority that Lord Castlereagh was the mysterious author of Waverley, London slid into its nocturnal mode. ‘Dear God!’ wrote Wordsworth, ‘the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still,’ but he was wrong. London never slept. Across the water in Belgium, Wellington’s army lay shivering in the freezing, drenching rain to the south of Brussels; and in London people were still dying and being born, footpads were still working the streets, thieves still casing properties, gamblers still at the tables, ‘fashionables’ still at Lady Salisbury’s, wives who were now widows, mothers and fathers who were now without sons, still streaming home from the theatres, mercifully unconscious of the drama unfolding on the other side of the Channel.