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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      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.

Midnight

      Belgium

      One of the strangest aspects of life in Belgium in these weeks and days before Waterloo is that people knew no more of what was going on than they did in Britain. It did not take a military strategist to realise that the first engagements of any campaign would occur in Flanders, but exactly when and where Bonaparte would strike was anyone’s guess.

      From the day that the Congress of Vienna declared him an outlaw Bonaparte had only two options in front of him, and one of those was in reality no option at all. With the allied armies advancing on the French frontiers from the east and the north-east he could in theory play the Fabian and simply wait in the hope of the allies falling out, but the only realistic, if slim, chance he had ever had of survival lay in taking on the enemy armies before they could unite, beating them in battle, and forcing the coalition to the negotiating table. If he simply sat and did nothing the sheer weight of allied numbers would inevitably overwhelm him. Military, political and geographical logic as well as time all pointed to a pre-emptive strike in the Low Countries before a Prussian army and a motley Anglo-Dutch force under the command of Wellington could invade France. In terms of national morale it made sense to fight any campaign on foreign soil, and with the loyalty of the Belgian population, only recently separated from France and joined with Holland in the United Kingdom of СКАЧАТЬ