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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ retiring soul who knew nothing of politics, as his counsel, the Whig politician Henry Brougham, insisted at his trial, Leigh Hunt had chosen his target well, and the government in their turn did all they could to turn him into a martyr. The verdict had been a foregone conclusion even before the two brothers came to trial, and in the February of 1813 they were sentenced to two years imprisonment, John Hunt to the House of Correction at Cold Bath Fields in Clerkenwell, and Leigh to the Surrey gaol in Horsemonger Lane, Southwark, where nine years before Colonel Despard and his fellow conspirators had been hanged and beheaded for high treason.

      Horsemonger Lane was not Leigh Hunt’s first experience of prison. His earliest memories were of the family’s room in the King’s Bench where his father had been incarcerated for debt, and imprisonment brought out that odd mixture of resilience and whimsy that was the hallmark of his character. He had been housed on arrival in a garret with a view – if he stood on a chair – of the prison yard and its chained inmates, but it was not long before a doctor had him moved to an empty room in the infirmary and there, in the midst of all the human hopelessness and despair that a London gaol was heir to, he turned his back on reality and created his own Arcadian retreat. ‘I turned [it] into a noble room,’ he wrote in his Autobiography, ‘I papered the walls with a trellis of roses; I had the ceiling coloured with clouds and sky; the barred windows I screened with Venetian blinds; and when my bookcases were set up with their busts, and flowers and a pianoforte made their appearance, perhaps there was not a handsomer room on that side of the water … Charles Lamb declared there was no other such room, except in a fairy tale.’

      His wife and child had been allowed to move in with him – another child would be born in the prison – and Hunt had not stopped at the Venetian blinds. There was a small yard outside his room that he shut in with green palings, and there in his own small and hidden kingdom, he planted his flowers and saplings and apple tree and entertained Lord Byron and Tom Moore as if some poor wretched country girl, guilty of infanticide, was not waiting execution only yards away.

      Byron and the Irish poet, Tom Moore, were not the only visitors, and for the two years that Leigh Hunt and his long-suffering family were in Horsemonger Lane, the Surrey gaol enjoyed a celebrity comparable with anything that Lamb or Holland House had to offer. The government had set out to teach the Hunts a lesson that all radical London would heed when they sent the brothers to prison, and instead they had turned a minor poet and journalist into a hero of the left, and the old infirmary washroom into a literary salon where you were as likely to meet Jeremy Bentham or James Mill as Lord Byron, the scowling William Hazlitt as the self-effacing Mary Lamb, the novelist Maria Edgworth and the painters David Wilkie and Benjamin Haydon as a politician like Henry Brougham, or the future editor of The Times, Thomas Barnes.

      Although it seems somehow typical of the born survivor he was that, while John languished in a cell sixteen feet by nine without books, pens, paper or company, Leigh Hunt entertained and wrote sonnets and read Italian poetry, it was not all roses and trellises at Horsemonger Lane. In the years ahead Hunt’s stock would plummet with many of those who had supported him through these years, but for the younger generation of Romantics such as Keats and Shelley, his painted idyll, set in the heart of the massive walls of a prison synonymous with government tyranny, was not a piece of escapist whimsy but a symbolic gesture of political defiance, an assertion of the freedom of the imagination, the independence of the word, the integrity of the arts, of everything in fact that The Examiner stood for and for which Lord Chief Justice Ellenborough – the champion of the pillory, the judge who sentenced Despard to death, and the perennial scourge of the liberals – had condemned the Hunts to gaol.

      A liberal metropolitan elite were not the only ones who saw it in this way, and long before the Hunts left gaol, The Examiner’s 2,000 subscribers had trebled and quadrupled in number, with the printers unable to keep up with demand. The government had believed that with the brothers locked up the paper would fail, but the Hunts had somehow managed to keep it going and in February 1815 – just a month before Bonaparte’s escape from Elba – they had emerged from their separate prisons unreformed, uncowed and unrepentant in their determination to find the Prince Regent as ludicrous as ever.

      If gaol had been the making of Leigh Hunt and The Examiner, elevating him to a place in the literary and moral life of the country that nothing he would do could hope to sustain, it had also taken an inevitable toll. In a series of essays written from prison he had wistfully imagined himself mingling with the London crowds beyond the prison walls, but once he was free again all those sights and sounds of outside life he had clung on to through two long, bitterly cold winters – the companionable crush of the theatre-bound coach, the smell of links, the ‘mudshine’ on the pavements, the awkward adjusting of ‘shawls and smiles’, the first jingle of music, the curtain, the opening words; London, in short, in all the heaving variety of the city that intoxicated Lamb – all filled him with an agoraphobic dread that he never entirely overcame.

      ‘In sooth, I know not why I am so sad’ – there would have been a time, in prison, when he would have given anything to hear that line and see the curtain rise on Shakespeare’s Venice and Kean’s Shylock and now he could no more have accepted Lord Byron’s offer of his box than he could have gone back to his first garret cell in Surrey gaol. In the middle of February 1815, he had forced himself to see the new enfant terrible’s Richard III, but the only place he pined for was his old painted washroom, the only freedom he could actually enjoy – hidden away in his Maida Vale retreat, in the little white-and-green study, his ‘box of lilies’, he had made for himself – was that freedom of ‘Fancy’ that not even an attorney general ‘could commit … to custody’.

      In a brutal way, too, events had left him behind, because while Leigh Hunt had never been a Bonapartist in the way that Hazlitt was, the bloodlust of the ‘war-whoopers’, the cant of the Tory press, the self-defeating madness of driving the French people into Bonaparte’s arms, the horror of war and the prospect of another and stupider Bourbon tyranny succeeding to that of the ‘Great Apostate from Liberty’, left him stranded in a no-man’s land of despair. In this Sunday’s Examiner he wrote his usual sanely decent piece, but with dawn already breaking over the sodden and freezing armies in Belgium, and public opinion polarised between the Bonapartist ferocity of Hazlitt and Godwin and the baying of the bloodhounds, Hunt sounded not so much like a prophet crying in the wilderness as an escapist shut away in his Maida Vale hideaway.

      He had come out of prison at the wrong time: ‘Examiner Hunt’s’ finger could point where it liked, the world was going its own way. The old campaigning Hunt, with his lightness of touch, and debonair spirit was not entirely silenced, however. As the printers finished setting the last page of Edition Number 390, and the newsboys, working on the one day of the week on which they could hope to see their families before nightfall, waited impatiently to begin their rounds, it would have been odd if they had not paused over a small item beneath the announcement that the Countess of Albemarle, George Keppel’s mother, had given birth to another son – an item so at odds with the paper’s avowed, high-minded policy of avoiding gossip and society news that it bears the imprint of Leigh Hunt’s ironic sense of incongruities: ‘Capt. Bontein, of the Life Guards, son of Sir G.B. to the daughter of Sir E. Stanley,’ it read. ‘The parties rode out from Lady Bontein’s to take an airing before dinner; they took post chaise and four at Barnet, and proceeded to Gretna Green, whither they were unsuccessfully pursued by Lady Stanley. The only objection to the match was, it is said, the age of the bride, who is under fourteen, and has a handsome fortune. The Parties have since been remarried in London.’

      Huddled up with their horses in the freezing rain south of Brussels, Captain Bontein’s friends in the Life Guards would enjoy that. It was, though, another item that would interest the navy operating off the French coast: one relating to Thomas Cochrane, the country’s most famous sailor since Nelson. ‘It is well known that many respectable persons have all along believed LORD COCHRANE to be perfectly free from any concern in the wretched fraud practised by De Berenger and others on the Stock Exchange,’ The Examiner announced. ‘This opinion, we СКАЧАТЬ