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

In these early hours of 18 June, as she lay beneath the heather thatch of her sister’s house, still too weak to recover her dead child, she will have known little of this. Nor would she know the charge hanging over her: ‘That albeit, by the laws of this and every other well governed Realm,’ read the preamble, ‘Murder, and more especially the Murder of a child by its own mother, is a Crime of an heinous nature, and severely punishable … the said Aurora MacLeod did in a field near to the stone house occupied by Murdoch MacLennan, Tacksman of Scalpay … and at or near to a cairn of stones in said field, bring forth a living and full term male child, and she did there immediately after the birth, wickedly and feloniously bereave of life and Murder the said child, by the Strangulation, or bruising the head and body thereof, or by other means … unknown, and she did thereafter expose the body of the said child … where it was afterwards found, much mangled and mutilated by dogs or other animals.’

Already her distinct Gaelic identity, and even her name, were dissolving in the maw of British justice. The small child who had come down to Caolas Scalpaigh to carry peat and draw water for Malcolm MacLeod was now the declarant ‘Aurora’ MacLeod. She would never see either Caolas Scalpaigh or her Lewis birthplace of Balincoll again. In front of her lay the short boat ride to Rodel, the schoolmaster and Sheriff-Substitute, Stornoway, the Tolbooth gaol at Inverness and the September assizes. Even the concealment of a pregnancy was a crime in itself, and when her trial finally came round – a young, sick girl, saddled with a name that would have meant nothing to her, in a court whose language she did not speak and where her only Tolbooth companion was another Lewis girl who had strangled her baby and thrown it in a loch – all that remained was the sentencing. And even that she did not get. There is no record, in fact, of what happened to Eury – Aurora – MacLeod. For some reason Aurora’s sentencing was reserved to the High Court of Judiciary at Edinburgh. There seems no obvious explanation for this postponement, and somewhere between Inverness and Edinburgh – a final, gratuitously appropriate touch – she would simply disappear, leaving only an entry in the Discharge Book of the Inverness Tolbooth and a cancelled minute in the records of the Edinburgh High Court of Judiciary to mark the obscure end of her short, invisible life.

All that, though, was still ahead of her. Behind her she would be leaving a dying world, caught up in its own inexorable, resistless tragedy of the Clearances, the death of the kelp trade, and emigrations. And beside the track up to the MacLennans’ well, this Sunday morning – tragedy and symbol rolled into one – lay the stillborn body of her child.1 (#litres_trial_promo)

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

I Wish It Was Fit

There was no more sign of Hazlitt’s bright star of liberty, or any other star, rising over the sodden slopes of Flanders this Sunday morning than there was on the Isle of Scalpaigh. To the old Peninsula men who remembered the nights before Salamanca and Vittoria, the thunder and lightning were omens of victory, but for the exhausted young boys of the 14th of Foot, Buckinghamshire farm lads in the main and still mostly in their teens, hungry, soaked to the skin, caked in mud, and un-bloodied in war, there was only the cold, numbing rain and fear.

‘What a sight to we old campaigners, but more particularly to the young soldiers,’ wrote home one Peninsula veteran, William Wheeler, camped with the 51st of Foot in a cornfield just beyond the 14th at the far right of the allied line that stretched out along the defensive ridge nine miles to the south of Brussels; ‘being close to the enemy we could not use our blankets, the ground was too wet to lie down, we sat on our knapsacks until daylight without fires, there was no shelter against the weather: the water ran in streams from the cuffs of our Jackets, in short we were as wet as if we had been plunged over head in a river. We had one consolation, we knew the enemy were in the same plight.’

Along the whole length of the line, officers and men were making the best of whatever shelter they could find, hunkering down under hedges or beneath cannon with only their pipes, brandy, gin and sheer exhaustion to anaesthetise the misery. ‘It was as bad a night as I ever witnessed,’ recalled another campaigner, a cavalryman from the 7th Hussars, who had already fought one bruising action against French lancers that day while covering the infantry withdrawal from Quatre Bras. ‘The uproar of the elements seemed to have been the harbinger of the bloody contest. We cloaked, throwing a part over the saddle, holding by the stirrup leather, to steady us if sleepy; to lie down with streams under us was not desirable, and to lie among the horses not altogether safe.’

It ought to have been impossible to sleep in such conditions, but a public school was perhaps as good a training in discomfort as a Scottish glen, and sixteen-year-old Ensign George Keppel of the 3rd Battalion of the 14th of Foot could not have stayed awake to save his life. From the day he had disembarked at Ostend, Keppel seemed to have done nothing but march and counter-march across Belgium, and it was late in the afternoon of the 17th, after one last weary haul from Nivelles, that his colonel had pointed out to him ‘a spot in the distance’ that he had never heard of, called Waterloo.

Had the young George Keppel been in any condition to take the long view of things, however, or just a fraction more self-important, he might have seen the hand of destiny at work in the bizarre chain of events that had brought him to an obscure Belgian village. His great-uncle Frederick had been a Bishop of Exeter and Dean of Windsor during the early years of George III’s reign, but with the exception of that genial, pluralist blot on the family honour, the Keppels had traditionally been courtier-warriors since they had arrived with ‘Dutch’ William in 1688, generals and admirals who had played their part in almost every British conflict from Oudenarde and Ramillies to Dettingen, Fontenoy, Culloden, Havana and Quiberon Bay.

While his father, the fourth earl, was something of a disappointment – a Whig courtier and racing man destined to spend most of his life waiting for the return of the good days – the young George, with all the easy, good-natured charm of the first earl, the spirit of his great-uncle who had circumnavigated the globe with Admiral Anson, and the liberal, populist instincts of all the staunchly Whig Keppels, was a throwback to a freer and more robust age. In the spring of 1815 he was still a schoolboy at Dr Page’s Westminster; but school had never been much more than a minor distraction for him, an alternative London address equally handy for the theatres or duck shoots, a convenient base from which he could as easily slip off to see the Princess Charlotte as join in with the mob stoning his father’s Portland Street house during the anti-Corn Law riots.

If the eighteenth century, in all its dubious and scandalous licence, survived into the early nineteenth century anywhere, it was in the English public schools, and pedigree and character had equipped Keppel to enjoy its freedoms to the full. In the memoirs of other Westminsters of only a slightly later generation, the talk is all of ‘shadows’ and ‘substances’ and the other ludicrous arcana of public school life, but in Keppel’s we get the authentic taste of an aristocratic Regency London, a world of prize-fighting, carriage-racing, bull-baiting, mail-coach driving, badger-drowning and the great clown Grimaldi – a world, in short, closer to that of his grandfather’s days than to the God-fearing institutions that would soon be taking shape in the dreams of George’s Winchester near-contemporary, Thomas Arnold.

There was not an ounce of malice, or what Arnold would darkly think of as ‘vice’, in the young Keppel, only boundless animal spirits and a happy, democratic talent for mixing as easily with gallows-bound ruffians down by the river as the heir presumptive to the throne. If he thought about his future at all it was in the vaguest terms of a career in the law and maybe a safe family seat in Parliament, but at the age of fifteen the Bar or the House of Commons – or anything in fact beyond the immediate confines of his schoolboy’s London world – all seemed to belong to a period with which he need not unduly concern himself.

Even the escape of Bonaparte from Elba had made almost no impression on a lad more interested in the exotic Madame Oldenburg’s hats than in politics, but in the mock-heroic drama Keppel liked to make of his life, their planets had already begun to converge. From his first days at Westminster he had used Abbot Livingstone’s wall in Great College Street to get in and out of Mother Grant’s boarding house, and on a night in the middle of March 1815, just as ‘another truant on a larger scale’ was about to enter Paris, George had slipped quietly back through Dean’s Yard after a night at the theatre to find waiting for him the rope ladder that the school Crispin – ‘Cobbler Foot by name, an old man-of-war’s man’ – had run up for precisely these eventualities.

It was a well-rehearsed routine – the scaling ladder hanging down on the street side, a convenient lean-to that the school authorities (‘not wise in their generation’, as Keppel sadly recorded) had kindly provided on the drop side, a straw dummy tucked up in his bed – and there seemed no reason to think anything was wrong. He had made his way over the wall without any difficulty and got safely back to his room; and it was only when he opened his door to find his bedding flung back and the straw doppelgänger strewn across the floor that he knew he was in trouble.

In the past he could invariably rely on his old childhood playmate, the Prince Regent’s capricious daughter and heir presumptive, Princess Charlotte, to come up with a lie on his behalf, but this time there was no way out. The next morning he had been ‘sorely puzzled’ at the silence which greeted him when he went into school, but ‘the mystery’ was solved the next day when a letter from his father informed him that his ‘school days had come to an end’, along with another ‘from Dr Page … recommending him to choose [a profession] in which physical rather than mental exertion would be a requisite’.

If nothing in his school career became him quite like the leaving, his father was never likely to see it that way, and retribution was fast. His older brother, Lord Bury, was already in the army and bound for Belgium, and the first that George knew that he was going to be joining him was when the next day Bury greeted him with the cheery news that from now on George would have to call him Sir.

A week earlier or a week later and George would almost certainly have been safe, but his timing could not have been worse, and he got home to find that his father had procured him a commission into the 14th of Foot. The first two battalions of the 14th were already on service in India and Italy, but in 1813 a third battalion had been raised and when the news from Elba reached London, the existing order to disband was hastily revoked and the battalion – the youngest and least experienced in the whole British army – was ordered for Ostend and the Low Countries.

Keppel was still well short of his sixteenth birthday, but as another brother disarmingly put it, there were ‘plenty of us’ Keppel children, and one younger son more or less was not going to make a lot of difference. In 1809 the three-week-old Henry – a future Admiral of the Fleet – was already in his father’s footpan for burial in the garden when a faint whimper brought the nurse, and sentiment was in equally short order when the young Ensign Keppel of the 14th of Foot, tricked out in his new uniform and as proud of its single-fringed epaulette as any Coleridgean dupe of a shepherd boy, presented himself to his unimpressed mother at a ball hosted by the Marquess of Lansdowne. ‘Holding the King’s Commission, I looked upon myself as a man, and was what young ladies would call “out”,’ he remembered: ‘My first gaiety was a great reunion at Lansdowne House. A less gay evening I have seldom spent. I still wanted two months of sixteen, and my fair complexion made me look still younger. In my excessive bashfulness I thought that every one whose eye I met was speculating upon what business a mere schoolboy could have in such an assembly. To complete the confusion, I encountered my mother, who, still young and handsome, did not care to see a second grown-up son in society. “What, George!” she exclaimed; “Who would have thought of seeing you here? There, run away, you’ll find plenty of cakes and tea in the next room.’”

For all his pride in his commission, the ‘Peasants’ of the 14th of Foot were not a fashionable lot and in any normal situation they would not have been allowed abroad, let alone on active service. The one saving grace for Keppel was that half of them were scarcely more than boys themselves, but even in a unit where fourteen of the officers and 300 of the rank and file were under the age of twenty, Keppel was the ‘baby’ of the battalion, ‘dry nursed’ by his seniors and saluted by his men with the kind of half-stifled smile that had had him hiding in embarrassment when he first joined them for embarkation at Ramsgate.

In spite of all the subsequent marching, however, it had not been a bad introduction to his new profession – there were always chance encounters with Westminsters, or an old ‘fag-master’ who had given him a ‘terrible licking for hiding in the coal-hole’, to make him feel at home – and above all they were going to get to fight. In the usual run of things the 14th would have been kept to garrison duties, but they had been saved from that by Lord Hill and on the evening of Saturday 17 June, Keppel and the rest of the battalion found themselves instead on the ridge of Mont-Saint-Jean queuing for their gin ration as part of the 4th Division’s 4th Brigade of Infantry.

The gin was pretty well the last thing Keppel could remember. His luggage had disappeared along with a baggage train two days earlier, but after the long march he was too tired to care about that, or anything else, and the next thing he knew was that it was two o’clock in the morning and he was lying flat out ‘in a mountain stream’ with his soldier-servant Bill Moles shaking him awake.

That had been two hours ago. Just behind where he lay was a cottage. As he went in he found three men sitting round a fire they had made out of broken-up chairs and tables, drying their clothes. Without speaking they made room for him. It was only when they put their uniforms back on that Keppel realised that one of them was Colonel Sir John Colborne – ‘afterwards General Lord Seaton GCB’ – and an old colleague of his brother’s in Spain. He was offered breakfast, but, ‘hungry as I was’, it was too ‘infinitesimally small’ to accept. It was a reminder, though, if a Keppel had ever needed one, of why he was there.

He was there because he belonged. Caste might trump rank, but it also brought with it its obligations and it was on the battlefield that they were met. For all his youth, as the second son of the 4th Earl of Albemarle, George was the beau ideal of what the Wellington army officer ought to be. Brought up from birth in an atmosphere of privilege, deference and noblesse oblige, with all the sanctions of habit, authority, wealth and the law arrayed behind him, he was the perfect instrument of command in a species of warfare that required only physical courage of its junior officers and blind obedience of its soldiers.

For the French officer who had carried the flaming sword of liberty, equality and fraternity to every part of Europe there was something morally repugnant about this. He would have been hard put to say what offended him most about Keppel, the aristocratic pedigree that outraged the meritocrat in him, or the utter ignorance of military matters that riled the professional man of arms. To the radical press at home, too, it was deeply offensive that an army was willing to sacrifice the lives ‘of hundreds of gallant countrymen’ to an outdated class system. And yet if he knew nothing else, Keppel knew the small print of the contract his class had made with society. ‘Mihi hodie, Tibi cras’ – ‘Me today, You tomorrow’ – a sign over the entrance to a military cemetery in the Far East warned Britain’s redcoats and after Quatre Bras no officer in Wellington’s army needed reminding of that. Five days earlier, Keppel had spent his sixteenth birthday at the Grammont race meeting with some fellow Westminsters. He had watched young Lord Hay, the darling of Brussels, dressed in his jockey’s silks, sitting in the scales, weighing out before a race. He ‘had hardly ever seen so handsome a lad’, he remembered, and now Hay was dead. It was a sobering thought.

George Keppel was brave – he would have behaved bravely whether it was naturally in him or not – but he was also young and he hated the wait. And now, as dawn was about to break, he could not get out of his head a story his father had told him. The earl had been speaking to the Bristolian bare-knuckle fighter, Henry ‘Game Chicken’ Pearce, just before his great battle with Daniel Mendoza for the Championship of England:

‘Well, Pearce,’ Albemarle had asked, ‘How do you feel?’

‘Well, my Lord,’ answered Pearce, ‘I wish it was fit.’

As George Keppel emerged from the cottage, still cold and hungry, his uniform drenched through, he stared out into the blackness towards the French lines and found Pearce’s words echoing and re-echoing in his brain. He too wished the fight was fit.

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

A Trellis of Roses

It had probably been as well for Hazlitt’s temper, as he and his wife walked home from the Lambs’, that he could not see into the offices in Maiden Lane on the north side of the Strand where that Sunday’s Examiner was being put to bed. On a good Sunday the newsboys would have collected their bundles an hour ago, but at times of crisis such as these, when foreign intelligence from Paris and the Low Countries was crowding home news off its sixteen, tight-crammed pages, the printers would be working deep into the early hours in a rush to get the paper on to the streets.

It had been a busy week both in and out of Parliament – the Budget; the annual loan; Wilberforce’s Slave Registration Bill; the Rosebery divorce; Lord Elgin’s petition for the purchase of his Greek marbles; the last Sunday of the Royal Academy exhibition; violence in Ireland, the usual slew of bankruptcies, an art robbery, the birth of a son to the Countess of Albemarle – but it was a small paragraph tucked away at the bottom of the third page that would have attracted Hazlitt’s ire. ‘The writer who is at present supplying our Theatrical Department,’ it read, ‘closed some masterly observations on Comus last week, with an attack on the tergiversation of some living poets, from which as far as Mr Wordsworth is concerned, we are anxious to express our dissent. If Mr WORDSWORTH praises any body, whom upon the whole neither the writer in question nor ourselves might think worthy of the panegyric, we are quite convinced, by the whole tenor of Mr WORDSWORTH’S life and productions, that he does it in a perfectly right spirit.’

If the disclaimer might have annoyed the ‘writer in question’, it would not have surprised him, because no two men who had so much in common could have been so far apart in temperament as William Hazlitt and James Henry Leigh Hunt. The Examiner and its editor were every bit as sceptical of Tory politics and placemen as Hazlitt himself, but Leigh Hunt was a Cavalier to Hazlitt’s Roundhead, a Suckling and not a Hampden, a poet of gentle, airy graces and high spirits, of fine and unworldly impulses, whose virtues and vices had yet to atrophy into the calculated helplessness that Dickens made such lethal use of in his portrait of Henry Skimpole.

Even at his angriest Hunt was a mocker not a ‘hater’. Where Hazlitt was all angry principle, Hunt was all exquisite feeling, a febrile, nervy creature, strung like some Aeolian harp to vibrate to the joys and sorrows of the world. In another century Hazlitt would have been found in the stocks with the Leveller John Lilburne or on the pyre with William Tyndale, but the hypochondriacal Hunt was not the stuff of which martyrs are usually made. It is one of the rummer ironies of the age that this Sunday, while the driven, misanthropic Hazlitt was free to add another brace of enemies to his score, the ‘mawkish, unmanly namby-pamby’ editor of The Examiner was still paying with his shattered health for the oddest, most whimsical stand ever made against Tory tyranny and mediocrity.

Hunt had not been strong enough to bring in his own copy to the offices this Sunday – two years in prison had left him an agoraphobic wreck too frightened to leave the safety of his own rooms – but The Examiner still, as ever, bore the imprint of his personality. The paper unquestionably owed its business stability and probity to the character of his brother John, but when any reader thought of The Examiner – the townsfolk of the young Thomas Carlyle’s Ecclefechan, for instance, who would queue excitedly for the mail-coach that brought the weekly edition to them – if anyone recalled its campaigns against army flogging, or the sale of army commissions to boys like Keppel, or the abuses of the theatre, then it was Leigh ‘Examiner’ Hunt and the distinctive, accusatory symbol of the pointing index finger with which he signed his articles that he thought of.

The Examiner had been in existence for seven years by 1815 – 18 June was Edition Number 390 – and in that time the Hunts had turned it into London’s and the country’s leading Sunday newspaper. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the Observer, the first of the ‘Sundays’, had declined into little more than a government propaganda rag, and for anyone looking beyond William Cobbett or such partisan heavyweights as the Whig Edinburgh Review or John Murray’s Tory Quarterly, the ‘impartial opinion’ on politics, theatre, literature or the arts promised by Leigh and John Hunt’s Examiner provided a new, fair and commanding voice in British public life.

In the political climate of the day, however, such success had its dangers. In their original prospectus the Hunts had proudly trumpeted their independence of all ‘party’, but Lord Liverpool’s was not a government to brook anything that even remotely smacked of opposition, and in 1812 a series of legal skirmishes over Examiner articles had finally come to a head with a libel trial provoked by Leigh Hunt’s attack on that ‘Adonis in loveliness’ and ‘Conqueror of Hearts’, the bloated and painted fifty-year-old Prince Regent. ‘What person, unacquainted with the true state of the case, would imagine,’ Hunt had demanded in response to an absurd panegyric on Prinny trotted out in the government press, ‘in reading these astounding eulogies, that this Glory of the People was the subject of millions of shrugs and reproaches! That this protector of the Arts had named a wretched Foreigner his Historical Painter … That this Maecenas of the Age patronised not a single deserving writer! … In short, that this delightful, blissful, wise, pleasurable, honourable, virtuous, true and immortal PRINCE, was a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man who has just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country or the respect of posterity.’

For an ‘artless’ and 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 are informed, will soon be shown to be the correct one … and that his Lordship had not the slightest knowledge of their dirty schemes.’

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