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

Nobody could be quite sure of the real extent of Bonaparte’s support in Belgium but it was not something Wellington ever felt it safe to ignore. There was clearly a deep resentment among its Catholic population at being forcibly lumped together with Protestant Holland under an Orange king, but if the experience of English travellers was anything to go by, that was nothing compared with the hatred that twenty years of French aggression and the destruction of their industry and trade through Bonaparte’s Continental system had caused. He had ruined their lace-makers, he had bankrupted their merchants, he had despoiled their art, he had taken their young men for his armies – ‘Il a mange tout,’ one traveller was told; ‘he cannot live without war, nor can the French; it is their trade; they live by it; they make their fortune by it; they place all their hopes in it; they are wolves that prey upon other nations, they live by blood and plunder.’

Bonaparte’s hopes were not entirely fantasy, however, because a year of peace had brought no more contentment to Europe than it had to Britain. The end of war had been greeted across an exhausted continent with pretty well universal relief, but the return of old rulers, old rivals and old ways had performed their predictable alchemy on popular feeling, and one quick, decisive victory might conceivably be all that was required.

If Bonaparte could have heard Wellington on the subject of the ‘infamous army’ he had under his command he would have had even more reason to be confident of his prospects. Wellington had finally left Vienna for his Brussels headquarters at the end of March, but even after more than two months of pressuring the government in London for reinforcements, his Anglo-Dutch army was still the most vulnerable of Bonaparte’s potential enemies, a rag-bag of Peninsula veterans, untried British battalions, Hanoverians, Nassauers, Brunswickers and Dutch and Belgian units spread out across a wide expanse of the Belgian countryside to the west of Brussels.

Wellington’s army was never as bad as myth or Wellington would have it, though, and there was never any intention that he should fight the campaign alone. To the south-east of his positions were Marshal Gebhard von Blücher’s Prussians, and if they might not have been the army they had been under Frederick the Great, the defeat at Jena in 1806 had sparked a wave of military reforms that had turned them into a formidable and determined enemy of Bonaparte and all things French.

Between the two allied armies, Wellington’s with his headquarters in Brussels and Blücher’s with his at Namur, was a force of around two hundred thousand men, but between the far right of the Anglo-Dutch and the far left of the Prussians lay something like one hundred and fifty miles of country, and in that gap lay Bonaparte’s best hope. It would never be possible for him to defeat their combined forces with the 120,000-odd men who made up his Army of the North, but if he could get between them, and pick each of them off separately, with the numerical superiority on his side, he would confidently back himself to come out on top.

With the benefit of hindsight, in fact, there was only one direction that Bonaparte would take in 1815, one area where the campaign would unfold, but Wellington had neither the benefit of hindsight nor in this instance even of foresight. The quality of his intelligence work in the Peninsula had made an important contribution to his success, but at this crucial juncture in European history, it for once failed him, leaving him utterly in the dark as to Bonaparte’s movements or intentions.

Bonaparte had left Paris in the early hours of 12 June, and as he headed north to join his army, an unsuspecting Brussels went on very much as it had since the first news of his escape from Elba had reached it three months before. There were rumours on the 14th that something was afoot but there were always rumours in Brussels, and as the hours ticked away towards the greatest battle of the nineteenth century, men and women were still pouring into a city that in those three hectic months had been transformed from a continental bolt-hole for indigent British émigrés into a cross between a military cantonment and Vanity Fair.

Among the unemployed soldiers and soldiers’ wives, commercial travellers, casual tourists, earnest Cambridge students, clergymen, invalids and antiquarians who made their way to Brussels in these early June days was a newly married woman of twenty-two called Magdalene De Lancey. On the face of it the new Lady De Lancey was everything Brussels society could have wished for, and yet if she was certainly grand enough on her mother’s side to have taken her place in the city’s expatriate aristocratic society, Magdalene Hall was as much her father’s daughter as her mother’s: the reserved, slightly awkward and stubbornly brave child of a family as famous in Scottish scientific and intellectual circles for its eccentricity as it was for its brilliance.

Magdalene’s mother, Helen, was the gentle and long-suffering daughter of the Earl of Selkirk, and her father Sir James Hall of Dunglass – the fourth baronet – one of the more unusual products of Edinburgh and Scotland’s golden age. Sir James had inherited his title and estate on the Berwickshire coast at the age of only fifteen, and after university at both Cambridge and Edinburgh had set off on the Grand Tour in the last days of the ancien régime, exploring rocks and meeting fellow scientists, hatching crackpot architectural theories, studying farming methods and talking mathematics, mathematics and mathematics with a young Corsican army cadet studying at Brienne called Napoleon Bonaparte.

It says something both for and about Sir James Hall that he had no memory of Bonaparte (the Emperor Napoleon, on the other hand, after more than thirty not entirely empty years, could clearly recall the first ‘Englishman’ he had ever met) but if this forgetfulness seems a tad casual Napoleon was not the only French tyrant that he had known. On the fall of the Bastille in 1789, Sir James had again crossed the Channel to be in Paris, and there he and his consumptive, republican brother-in-law, Lord Daer, had thrown themselves into revolutionary politics, attending the Assembly and Jacobin Club during the days and dining with Robespierre, Sieyès or Tom Paine at night during those last, fateful weeks of the doomed Bourbon monarchy and the ‘cochon’ Louis’s flight to Varenne.

Republican, atheist, Jacobin: these were not the kind of credentials to make a man popular in the paranoid Tory Scotland of the 1790s, and even in good Whig circles the suspicions that Sir James was not quite all there would never entirely go away. There had always been a question in the family as to whether he would turn out a man of genius or an idiot, and with the jury still out on it when he died, something of the same suspicions would always hang over his children. ‘He was the second son of Sir James Hall,’ the brilliant memoirist Elizabeth Grant – the ‘Highland Lady’ – wrote of Magdalene’s older brother, Basil, ‘a man not actually crazy, but not far from it; so given up to scientific pursuits as to be incapable of attending to his private affairs … [Lady Helen] was a sister to the Lord Selkirk who went to colonise America. How could the children of such a pair escape. Their eldest son was a fool merely; Basil, flighty … the third, Jamie, used to cry unless Jane or I danced with him – nobody else would. Three or four beautiful girls died of consumption … two were idiots out at nurse somewhere in the country, and one had neither hands nor feet, only stumps. I used to wonder how Lady Helen kept her senses; calm she always looked, very kind, she always was, wrapped up her affections were in Basil and the two daughters who lived and married – Magdalene … Lady De Lancey … and Emily, the wife of an English clergyman.’

The ‘fool’ of an eldest boy was, in fact, a painter and scientist of some distinction, Basil a lionised traveller and writer, and Sir James himself the president of the Scottish Royal Society, and yet it was anything but a cushioned world in which Magdalene Hall had grown up. As a young man her father had rowed the great geologist James Hutton around the shore by the Halls’ Dunglass estate, and if the young Magdalene, watching another sister sink into the grave, had ever wondered what kind of God could allow such suffering, her childhood walks along the cliffs at Siccar Point could have offered no easy consolations. ‘On us who saw these phenomena for the first time, the impression made will not be easily forgotten,’ the mathematician John Playfair wrote of the moment when he and Hall – two Doubting Thomases of the new science – saw for themselves in the folds and stacks of Siccar Point the indisputable physical evidence of the infinitely old, pitilessly indifferent universe that Hutton’s geology and Herschel’s telescopes were conjuring into existence: ‘What clearer evidence could we have had of the different formations of these rocks, and the long interval which separated their formation, had we actually seen them emerging from the bosom of the deep? We felt ourselves necessarily carried back to the time when the schistus on which we stood was yet at the bottom of the sea, and when the sandstone before us was only beginning to be deposited … An epoch still more remote presented itself, when even the most ancient of these rocks, instead of standing upright in vertical beds, lay in horizontal planes at the bottom of the sea, and was not yet disturbed by that unmeasurable force which has burst asunder the solid pavement of the globe. Revolutions still more remote appeared in the distance of this extraordinary perspective. The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.’

For a young child of the Scottish Enlightenment schooled in the rigours of such a universe – the daughter of an atheist and the sister of two ‘idiot’ girls – it had been an improbably romantic path that had brought Magdalene Hall to Belgium. She had only met her husband for the first time a few months before, but six years earlier, her brother Basil, then a lieutenant with HMS Endymion taking part in the evacuation of Sir John Moore’s exhausted army from Corunna, had rescued and befriended a young, very tired, very dirty and unshaven army officer. ‘We divided the party among us,’ he later recalled, ‘and I was so much taken with one of these officers, that I urged him to accept such accommodation as my cabin and wardrobe afforded. He had come to us without one stitch of clothes beyond what he wore, and these, to say the truth, were not in the best condition, at the elbows and other angular points of his frame. Let that pass – he was as fine a fellow as ever stepped; and I had much pride and pleasure in taking care of him during the passage.’

The threadbare army officer Basil Hall befriended was William Howe De Lancey, the twenty-seven-year-old, New York-born, English-educated scion of an American Huguenot family who had paid with their wealth and estates for their loyalty to the British crown during the American War of Independence. At the time of Corunna De Lancey was already a promising lieutenant colonel on the staff, and in the six years since he had consolidated his reputation as one of the most gifted of Wellington’s young officers, ending the war with the Talavera, Nive, Salamanca, St Sebastian and Vittoria clasps to his Peninsula Gold Cross and a KCB to underline the trust Wellington had in his abilities.

In the inevitable way of war, sailor and soldier never met again, but the rising star of the army never forgot the naval lieutenant who had shared with him his cabin, linen and razor. On the abdication of Bonaparte in 1814, De Lancey had been appointed to a position on the staff in Scotland, and by the late spring of 1815 – Jane Austen’s Admiral Croft would have approved – had met, courted and wed the second of Sir James Hall’s three daughters, Basil’s sister Magdalene.

Sir William and Lady De Lancey were at the Dunglass estate near Siccar Point on their ‘treaclemoon’ – as Byron, just escaped from his own honeymoon nightmare farther south on the bleak Durham coast would have it – when the news of Bonaparte’s escape and De Lancey’s recall reached them. On assuming command in Brussels, Wellington had wanted as many of his old Peninsula officers as he could muster, and high on his list to replace the wretched quartermaster-general the army had foisted on him was William De Lancey. ‘To tell you the truth, I am not well pleased with the manner in which the Horse Guards have conducted themselves towards me,’ Wellington had complained to Lord Bathurst, the Secretary for War; ‘It will be admitted that the army is not a very good one, and, being composed as it is, I might have expected that the Generals and Staff formed by me in the last war would have been allowed to come to me again; but instead of that, I am overloaded with people I have never seen before; and it appears to be purposely intended to keep those out of my way whom I wished to assist me.’

The duke would not always get his way with appointments – and the newly married De Lancey was not at all sure he was ready to resume his career at his old rank – but Wellington was ready to fight for him and by 16 April, Major General Torrens was writing to reassure him that his new QMG was ‘on his way out … I told him the very handsome and complimentary manner in which you asked for his services, and assured him that nothing could be so gratifying, in my view of the case, to his military and professional feelings, as the desire you expressed to me of having him again with you.’

The new Lady De Lancey had followed Sir William south to London and then, on 8 June, across to Brussels where for one brief week they were billeted on the fourth floor of Count de Lannoy’s house overlooking the Parc. De Lancey had been confident even then that it would be another month before there could be any fighting, but the newlyweds were taking no chances with the time they had together, cocooning themselves in a world of their own, walking out only when the rest of Brussels was dining, dining when the rest of Brussels was walking, utterly oblivious to the fears and rumours that filled the air or to the cavalry reviews, assignations and race meetings that made up the lives and the diaries of the rest of Brussels’ British population.

It was not a regime to make a new bride much liked by fashionable Brussels – especially not the bride of a man as popular as Sir William De Lancey – but that was the last thing to worry Magdalene. In the months to come she would add a faintly pious gloss of gratitude for the memory of these few days together, but there was an unabashedly worldly joy in the way she seized her brief happiness, an implicit sense in everything she said and did that a whole lifetime had to be crushed into these few hours and an entire world into their Brussels rooms. ‘I never passed such a delightful time, for there was always enough of very pleasant society,’ she recalled, ‘I used to sit and think with astonishment of my being transported into such a scene of happiness, so perfect, so unalloyed! – feeling that I was entirely enjoying life – not a moment wasted. How active and how well I was! I scarcely knew what to do with all my health and spirits. Now and then a pang would cross my mind at the prospect of the approaching campaign, but I chased away the thought, resolving not to lose the present bliss by dwelling on the chances of future pain.’

There had been a ‘small alarm’ on the afternoon of the 14th that had come to nothing, and even deep into the afternoon of Thursday 15th – ‘the happiest’ day of her life it had been until then – the only thing to disturb them was a three-line whip that would take him away from her for the early part of the evening. The De Lanceys had been invited to a ball that night at the Duchess of Richmond’s that they could safely miss, and as they dallied away the afternoon in their rooms overlooking the Parc, putting off the moment when he would have to dress for dinner with General Alava, there seemed no reason to think that that evening or that ball would be any different from any other that filled the aristocratic Brussels life that they had so determinedly avoided. ‘We little dreamt that Thursday was the last we were to pass together, and the storm would burst soon,’ she remembered, ‘Sir William had to dine at the Spanish Ambassador’s, the first invitation he had accepted from the time I went; he was unwilling to go, and delayed and still delayed, till at last when near six, I fastened all his medals and crosses on his coat, helped him to put it on, and he went. I watched at the window till he was out of sight, and then I continued musing on my happy fate; I thought over all that had passed, and how grateful I felt! I had no wish but that this might continue; I saw my husband loved and respected by everyone, my life gliding on, like a gay dream, in his care.’

She was mistaken. While Wellington’s quartermaster-general idled away the afternoon with his young bride, and the commander of his 4th Division sat in the Richmonds’ garden assuring their daughters that nothing was in the offing, Bonaparte had crossed the border and Charleroi was in French hands. The duke had, in his own words, been ‘Humbugged’. Moving with all his old clandestine speed and decision – the borders had been sealed since 7 June, with coaches immobilised, fishing vessels held in port, letters intercepted – Bonaparte had spent just three days on the road from Paris and by the 14th was with his Army of the North concentrated around Beaumont. On the 15th, the anniversary of Marengo, he had issued his memorable orders of the day and by 11 a.m. was in Charleroi reviewing his advancing troops. Ahead of him, to his right, were the Prussians under Blücher. To the left, scattered across a wide area of the Belgian countryside, Wellington’s army. And between them, guarded only by a small allied force at Quatre Bras, the road to Brussels.

In his anxiety to escape envelopment Wellington had guessed wrong. No British general likes being separated from the Channel and in his conviction that any attack would come from his western flank he had opened up a gap between the two allied armies. Now all he could do was plug that gap. At five in the afternoon orders were issued for his scattered army to prepare to march, and by seven, as Brussels rang to the first sounds of bugles, Magdalene De Lancey knew that her dream was over. ‘When I had remained at the window nearly an hour,’ she recalled, living again those last moments of happiness before the husband of two months metamorphosed into the soldier and another small, private life was swallowed up in the drama of war, ‘I saw an aide-de-camp ride under the gateway of our house. He sent to enquire where Sir William was dining. I wrote down the name; and soon after I saw him gallop off in that direction. I did not like this appearance, but I tried not to be afraid. A few minutes after, I saw Sir William on the same horse gallop past to the Duke’s, which was a few doors beyond ours. He dismounted and ran into the house, leaving his horse in the middle of the street. I must confess my courage failed me now, and the succeeding two hours formed a contrast to the happy forenoon.’

At around nine, ‘Sir William came in; seeing my wretched face, he bade me not be foolish, for it would soon be all over now; they expected a great battle on the morrow … He said it would be a decisive battle, and a conclusion of the whole business … He said he should be writing all night, perhaps: he desired me to prepare some strong green tea in case he came in, as the violent exertion requisite to setting the whole army in motion quite stupefied him sometimes. He used sometimes to tell me that whenever operations began, if he thought for five minutes on any other subject, he was neglecting his duty. I therefore scrupulously avoided asking him any questions, or indeed speaking at all. I moved up and down like one stupefied myself.’

For all Brussels it had been a long, sleepless night, punctuated by the endless reveilles echoing through the streets, by the sounds of aides coming and going, messengers galloping into the darkness, and of an army mustering for war. De Lancey had put in place plans for Magdalene to leave for the safety of Antwerp, but as dawn broke and they stood for the last time at their window together and the last plumed Highland bonnet disappeared through the Namur Gate, and the sound of the bagpipes and fifes finally melted away, Magdalene De Lancey did not need to have gone to school at Siccar Point to fear the worst.

It would have been strange, in fact, if she had not wondered, as the carriage carrying her and her maid Emma rolled northwards towards Antwerp, whether the intense happiness of those few days in Brussels had only been given her to be snatched away again. Her husband had made her promise though that she would listen to nothing until she had heard directly from him, and for the next two days she was as good as her word, immuring herself in the rooms at the back of the Laboureur Inn, windows tight shut against the world, and telling herself that the sound of cannon was the distant roll of the sea on her family’s Dunglass estate.

She had stayed up deep into the night on Friday, waiting to learn whether she was a widow or a wife, but no message had come. Through the Saturday, too, as the streets of Antwerp echoed to the ominous rumble of carts and rumours of war, she continued her vigil, her doors locked, her maid forbidden to go out into the town or repeat anything she had heard. She had told herself over and again that De Lancey would be safe – she had kept her word not to listen to any rumours, she had kept her side of the bargain – and exactly on the stroke of midnight, as the Sunday of 18 June dawned and the rain lashed against her window, she had her reward. It was only a few hurried lines that her husband had sent, written at Genappe on the Charleroi road south of Brussels. There had been a battle, fought on the 16th, he told her, and ‘he was safe, and in great spirits’; ‘they had given the French a tremendous beating’. Whether, though, Quatre Bras was to be the final battle, William De Lancey did not say. In Belgium the day of Waterloo had begun.

1 a.m. (#ua0d38e15-c319-53ca-86de-1325a3a073d6)

Cut

It was raining in London too as a man in his early thirties, unshaved and wild looking, stumbled out through the wicket gate at the top of Inner Temple Lane, and turned down Fleet Street into the Strand.

William Hazlitt was drunk and had every intention of staying drunk for as long as he could. For the best part of a year he had had to live with the humiliation of his hero Bonaparte, and he was not the man to sacrifice his moment of angry triumph now that the people’s time had come and the ‘Child Roland of the Revolution’ – ‘the Colossus of the age’, the ‘prostrate might and majesty of man’, as he saluted Bonaparte – had ‘risen from the dead’ to scatter the Bourbon ‘spiders and toads’ from beneath his giant shadow.

There was an astonishing violence about Hazlitt’s anger – the violence of the boxing ring that he so much loved, the violence of a man jabbing and jabbing his opponent to a bloody pulp – that was part a matter of principle and part personality. There was no political writer in Regency England who was so honest in his hatred of tyranny, but in Hazlitt everything that was best and worst were inextricably mixed, the strong stems of English libertarianism hopelessly entangled with the weeds of anti-popery, the fine intelligence mired in an abject and humiliating sensuality, the blazing hatred of injustice rooted in an innately suspicious, misanthropic character that was as slow to forgive a kindness as it was a slight.

Even at the best of times Hazlitt’s was a face you could watch for a month and not see smile – the lined, wary face of a man who expected to be dunned or robbed at every moment, the face of Caius Cassius who ‘quite saw through the deeds of men’ – and he had not had the best of evenings. It had been a long time since he and Charles Lamb had seen the world through the same eyes, and yet even now if there was one place where Hazlitt might hope to be welcome, where his anger might be dissolved in the alcoholic haze of his host’s good nature – one place, in his mind, where the only sensible woman in all London was to be found – it was at the Lambs’ chambers in Hare Court.

He could hardly have been surprised that old James Burney had turned his back on him after the mauling he had given his sister Fanny’s novel in the Edinburgh, but what business a prosing turncoat like Robinson had cutting him was another matter. Hazlitt did not need lecturing on Wordsworth by anyone, and was there anything he had said in The Examiner that was not true? Would the ‘patriot’ Milton have written ‘paltry sonnets’ upon the ‘royal fortitude’ of the old mad king? Would Milton have suppressed his early anti-war poems to spare the sensibilities of a blood-besotted nation? Would Milton – to whom Wordsworth, ‘the God of his own idolatry’, so liked to compare himself – have traded in every principle of his youth to become a Tory Government’s Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland?

Hazlitt hated the Tories and their placemen and their pensioners, hated the hired pens of the government-controlled press, hated the mental servitude into which the nation had sold itself, and above all he hated the renegade liberal with a violence that had all the bitterness of the disappointed acolyte behind it. It was absurd to expect anything more of some shuffling, tuft-hunter of a lawyer like Robinson, but it sickened him that the men who had taught the ‘dumb, inarticulate … lifeless’ child that he had once been to think and feel, the men who had once hailed the new dawn of freedom in France, were these same ‘Jacobin renegados’ – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey – who now filled the niches of Robinson’s pantheon.

He told himself he had ‘done’ with them, but he was fooling himself – he could no more have done without them than he could have done without oxygen – and the memory of what they had meant to him and the world their poetry had opened up only made their apostasy the more intolerable. Hazlitt had been scarcely more than a boy when he had first met Coleridge, but he could never forget the day he had got up in the dark to walk the ten miles to Shrewsbury to hear him preach ‘Upon Peace and War’, the sound of his voice rising from a plain Unitarian pulpit ‘like a stream of rich distilled 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. (#ua0d38e15-c319-53ca-86de-1325a3a073d6)

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 and servants, ladies and stable boys, lords and beggars; Dutchmen, Belgians, and Britons, bewildered garçons and scared filles de chambre; all crowded together, jostling, crying, scolding, squabbling, lamenting, exclaiming, whipping, swearing and vociferating’.

It had been a day of mayhem and fear, of crowded roads, of rumour and counter-rumour, of victory and defeat – the Prussians had held the French, the French had destroyed the Prussians, Wellington was wounded and the British defeated, the French were in retreat, Brussels was in French hands – and now, twenty-four hours later, as the sound of hammering ceased and the Laboureur Inn fell silent, Charlotte Waldie slipped out of her room and down the stairs to see for herself the other side of war. ‘It was a solemn and affecting scene,’ she recalled as she entered the same small chamber where Magdalene De Lancey had rested for an hour and which now contained ‘the last narrow mansion of a brave and unfortunate prince’. Tapers were burning at the head and foot of the coffin, and the room was now empty except for ‘two Brunswick officers who were watching over it, and whose pale, mournful countenances, sable uniforms, and nodding black plumes, well accorded with the gloomy chamber. It was but yesterday that this prince, in the flower of life and fortune, went out into the field of military ardour, and gloriously fell in battle, leading on his soldiers to the charge. He was the first of the noble warriors who fell on the memorable field of Quatre Bras. But he has lived long enough who has lived to acquire glory.’

The coffin was that of Frederick William, Duke of Brunswick, the cousin of the Prince Regent, the brother of Queen Caroline, a favourite uncle of the Princess Charlotte, and one of the first casualties of Hazlitt’s battle between liberty and legitimacy. For the last six years the duke had held the rank of lieutenant general in the British Army, but it was as a hero of the German struggle against Bonaparte that he had made his name, raising, equipping and commanding his famous force of ‘Black Brunswickers’ in a quixotic and doomed bid to reclaim the duchy lost after the death of his father at Jena in 1806.

With his flat, coarse potato of a face, his great side-whiskers and a nose that would have graced a Hanseatic merchant, it would be difficult to imagine a less romantic-looking figure than the duke. And yet in spite of everything that his sister Caroline could do to taint it, romance still clung to the Brunswick name. ‘The Brunswickers are all in black,’ the engagingly uxorious Sir Augustus Frazer, in command of Wellington’s horse artillery, had written home to his wife, after admiring the duke’s hussars at the great review in May, ‘the Duke having, in 1809, when the Duchess died, paid this tribute of respect to his wife. There is something romantic in this. They are to change their uniform when they shall have avenged themselves on the French for an insult offered to the remains of the Duke’s father. Is this chivalry, or barbarity?’