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

Everywhere, the great and small acts of life were being played out. At the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden, where thirty-five years earlier, Basil Montagu’s mother, Martha Ray, had been shot through the head by James Hackman as she climbed into her carriage, they had been watching The Fortune of War. At the Royal Amphitheatre, on the other side of the river, there had been ‘a Real Horse Race and a Real Fox Chase’ among the twenty-one scenes of Astley’s new equestrian pantomime. On the west side of Hare Court, Kean’s Wolf Club were just beginning the serious business of the night. A little farther past the Coalhole in the Strand, as old George Dyer hurried away to be the first with Lamb’s news of Castlereagh, the printers would be putting to bed the next day’s Examiner. In Bedford Square to the north of their office, Henry Hallam’s wife – the mother of Tennyson’s Hallam of ‘In Memoriam’ – had gone into labour. To the west, the hated Duke of Cumberland, just arrived in England to persuade Parliament to increase his allowance on his marriage to his German mistress, was walking home from Carlton House. To the east, London’s notorious Recorder, Sir John Silvester, the defending lawyer at Hackman’s trial thirty-five years earlier, was leaving a banquet at the Mansion House. A street away, behind the blank forbidding walls of Newgate gaol, a young woman Silvester had sentenced to death nine weeks earlier lay in the condemned cell waiting on the ‘fount of royal mercy’ that was the Prince Regent to learn her fate. At 13 Piccadilly, the newly married and pregnant Lady Byron was lying awake and awaiting the return of her husband, while across in Whitehall, his former mistress, dressed as a page, scribbled away furiously at the longest suicide note in history.

And beyond London, spreading out in concentric rings across the blackness of the country and the farms and villages and towns of Britain, thirteen million souls lived out their own separate lives in this strange phoney pause in the nation’s life. At Hoxton, where Mary Lamb had spent so many months, officers and soldiers in the military asylum, forgotten victims of twenty years of war, lay, two to a cot, in their own stale urine. Somewhere out in the darkness, among the two million on parish relief this night, another mad old soldier, the Tortoise Man, would be asleep under his upturned barrow. On the south coast at Arundel, where the mighty Howard clan were gathered at the Duke of Norfolk’s castle, workers would be toiling through the night putting the last touches to the stands for the celebrations of the 600th anniversary of Magna Carta. At Wigan, a young boy, mauled that afternoon by a tiger at a menagerie, lay in agony with his face torn off. In Glasgow a gang readied themselves for the next day’s robbery of a textile shop and on the Isle of Harris, in the brief darkness of a Scottish midsummer night, a bloodied bundle lay unseen beside a pathway.

And beyond Britain’s shores, out in the Downs, the thirty-one sail of the largest East India fleet ever assembled lay unseen in the mucky night. Off the coast of France, Sir Henry Hotham’s blockading squadron waited and watched. At the entrance to Botany Bay the Northampton Transport, with its 111 female convicts on board, was ending its six months voyage. In Brussels, Charles Burney’s sister, Fanny D’Arblay, lay fully clothed on her bed and waiting to flee. And as the rain poured down and the lightning flashed, a Scottish servant girl called Emma was carrying a folded note upstairs to the back room of a secluded town-house in Antwerp. The day of Waterloo had begun.