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

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СКАЧАТЬ perfume’. It was, he remembered, as if poetry and philosophy had met, ‘Truth and Genius had embraced’ and a young man had heard the ‘music of the spheres’. After seventeen years he could still recall the text, the ‘Siren’s song’ of the voice, the ‘strange wildness in his look’ as if it had been yesterday: ‘He talked of those who had “inscribed the cross of Christ on banners dripping with human gore”.’ He showed ‘the fatal effects of war, drew a striking contrast between the simple shepherd boy, driving his team afield, or sitting under the hawthorn, piping to his flock, “as though he never should be old”, and the same poor country lad, crimped, kidnapped, brought into town, made drunk in an ale house, turned into a wretched drummer boy, with his hair sticking on end with powder and pomatum, a long cue at his back, and tricked out in the lonesome finery of the profession of blood.’

      There was not a thought or feeling he had ever had, Charles Lamb would say, that he did not owe to Coleridge, and for the son of an obscure dissenting minister of Irish origins, cribb’d and cabin’d in a remote Shropshire village, that day had come with all the force and absoluteness of an evangelical conversion. Hazlitt had grown up in the fine, rational Republican Unitarian tradition that boasted Milton and Priestley as its torch-bearers, but here for the first time in a Shrewsbury pulpit were truths and a language that his dry, difficult and honourable father, ‘poring from morn to night’ over his Bible and Commentaries in the internal exile of Wem, could never teach him. ‘I had no notion then that I should ever be able to express my admiration to others in motley imagery or quaint allusion, ’till the light of his genius shone into my soul, like the sun’s rays glittering in the puddles of the road … that my understanding did not remain dumb and brutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe to Coleridge.’

      Hazlitt had honoured that debt in private and in public with the great hammer blows of his prose and if honouring it now meant going into the ring with the men who sold out to the old Tory idols of God and King and Law, then he was ready. For more than two hundred years his England had defined itself as a nation by its opposition to Popish tyranny, and there could be no truce now with an English government and its hireling army bent on restoring a malignant Bourbon tyrant to ‘pollute the air’ and squat, toad-like, on ‘the corpse of human liberty’. There was only one issue for Hazlitt: did the people belong, like cattle, to a family, or were they free? Beside that all else was irrelevant.

      The Tory press branded him a Jacobin. It was a title he was proud of. To be a true Englishman now, to stand in the great tradition that stretched back through the political martyrs of the 1790s and down the long line of Whig history to Milton, the Commonwealth and the Reformation, was to be a Jacobin, and ‘to be a true Jacobin,’ – Hazlitt’s battle cry had never rung clearer or more urgently – ‘a man must be a good hater’. ‘The true Jacobin hates the enemies of liberty, as they hate liberty, with all his strength and with all his might, and with all his heart and with all his soul … He never forgets or forgives an injury done to the people, for tyrants never forget or forgive one done to themselves … He makes neither peace nor truce with them. His hatred of wrong only ceases with the wrong. The sense of it, and of the barefaced assumption of the right to inflict it, deprives him of his rest. It stagnates in his blood. It loads his heart with aspics’ tongues, deadly to small pens. It settles in his brain – it puts him beside himself. Who will not feel all this for a girl, a toy, a turn of the dice, a word, a blow, for anything relating to himself; and will not the friend of liberty feel as much for mankind?’

      It was a lonely eminence to stand on, but he was used to that. ‘Hating,’ he acknowledged with a haughty, Miltonic defiance, was ‘the most thankless of all tasks’. He had not heard Mary Lamb’s parting remark to Robinson – Robinson was lucky, she had murmured to him, that he had so many friends that he could afford to cut them – but it would have come as no surprise to Hazlitt. Solitude was the price of truth and he was ready to pay it. No defender of ‘the people’ expected so little of that ‘toad-eating creature man’; no champion of liberty felt so little affinity with his political allies; no husband ever had less sympathy from the wife who walked home silent at his side. Lamb, at Hazlitt’s wedding, had had trouble stopping himself giggling, but there had not been much cause for giggling since. His heart, ‘shut up in the prison house’ of ‘rude clay’, had never found ‘a heart to speak to’ and in his lonely, angry pride he knew it never would. His soul, too, might remain ‘in its original bondage’ but that understanding – the power of words – that Coleridge had unlocked in the dumb angry child of dissent was still his and he would still use it. Ten years before, when news came of Bonaparte’s victory at Austerlitz, he had walked out into a Shropshire night and watched the evening star set over a poor man’s cottage with a sense that here was a new Bethlehem and a new era being born. Now, somewhere in Belgium, that star was about to rise again.

      As they reached the top of Queen’s Street, Hazlitt and his wife turned off from St James’s Park, and right again into York Street. They were home. It was a house he rented from the dry, mechanical, utilitarian Bentham, but the garden had once been Milton’s and the home of English liberty. And so long as Hazlitt lived there it would be still.

2 a.m.

      Dance of Death

      In these early hours of Sunday morning a woman in her late twenties called Charlotte Waldie sat alone in her room in Antwerp’s Laboureur Inn. Her brother and sister had long since gone to bed, but even after two sleepless nights Charlotte had no intention of missing out on anything. As the rain lashed against the window panes and the thunder rolled in the distance she sat listening to the ‘dismal sound’ of a coffin lid being nailed down in a room below and waited for the inn to fall quiet.

      Charlotte Waldie had been born of a Scottish father and an English mother on the family estate by the Tweed River, near the ancient abbey town of Kelso. In her later accounts of these days in Belgium she would always sign herself ‘An Englishwoman’, but underneath that rather cool description was a child of the turbulent Scottish Borders, a glowing patriot of the school of Walter Scott with an inexhaustible appetite for experience, a gift for prose of a breathless, heady kind, a travel writer’s eye for detail and an unashamed habit of seeing the whole world as copy for her pen.

      On Sunday 18 June, Charlotte Waldie had been in Belgium for just six days. She had sailed from Ramsgate with her brother and sister on an overcrowded packet on the afternoon of the 10th, and thirty-six stifling and miserable hours later, had been rowed ashore from their becalmed boat in the dead of night, unceremoniously carried through the waves and dumped somewhere on the sands of the Belgian coast near Ostend.

      The family had been forced to leave servants, barouche and baggage behind when they abandoned the packet for their rowing boat, but Charlotte Waldie was not a gothic novelist for nothing, and anything tamer would probably have been a disappointment. The Waldies had no more idea than anyone else in Britain or Belgium of what might be happening on the other side of the French border, and after the English tourist’s customary genuflections in the direction of High Art and Rubens – and an audience in Ghent with the woefully unromantic ‘Louis le Désiré’ – had arrived in Brussels just in time to hear that Bonaparte had crossed the border and to follow half of the expatriate population in their panicked stampede from a city suddenly under threat.

      Only hours earlier, Brussels had seemed a place of ‘hope, confidence and busy expectation’, but as the first, confused reports from the front came in and the sound of cannon – twenty miles away? ten? five? no one could be sure – rolled across the now deserted Parc, Brussels turned on itself in a frantic struggle to get the last horse, carriage or cart out of the city before the French arrived. ‘Old men in their night-caps, women with dishevelled hair,’ Charlotte had watched the chaotic scenes in the courtyard below from her room in the Hôtel de Flandre, ‘masters СКАЧАТЬ