Went the Day Well? Read online

  There was nothing ignoble in his ambition – it was, after all, God’s work out there – and if God’s will and Chalmers’s often seemed conveniently close he was not the first or the last nineteenth-century evangelical to come to the same cosy accommodation. He might have been more reluctant to leave the parish if Kilmany’s gentry had embraced his communitarianism with greater zeal, but entrenched interests die hard and when late the previous summer his growing fame as a preacher attracted the attention of the Tron church in Glasgow, there seemed nothing in Fife to stop him hearing in the summons the unmistakable ‘Call of Providence’.

  There could have been no greater challenge or contrast than that facing Chalmers as he said goodbye to Kilmany, behind him a homogenous rural parish without Dissenters or Catholics, and before him a dynamic, heaving world of violent extremes, of cotton mills, dye works, iron foundries and merchant princes; of miserable, overcrowded tenements, squalor, unemployment, ignorance, pollution and disease. On the eve of the French wars Glasgow had numbered something over forty thousand inhabitants, but by 1815 that figure had almost trebled to create a metropolis that had outgrown its political and religious institutions, a city of Irish Catholics, frustrated radicals, dispossessed agricultural labourers and aggressive Dissenters to whom the established Church of Scotland had nothing to say and no relevance.

  For the established Churches of Scotland and England, sunk in the long snooze of the eighteenth century and tied by education and interest to the propertied classes, here was the challenge of the future. It is no coincidence that at the same time that Chalmers was assuming his new ministry the newly ordained John Keble was beginning his down in a Cotswold village, because that same deep evangelical current that would take Chalmers to Glasgow and stir the Churches out of their latitudinarian torpor was flowing into every aspect of national life in a way that it had not done since the Commonwealth and the reign of the saints.

  This evangelical movement was not a very attractive impulse – a conviction of the utter depravity of unredeemed man is not a happy base for social regeneration – but if the tree is to be known by its fruits then there is no escaping its power. Within the Churches themselves it would soon lose its initial transforming vitality, but one of the great paradoxes of evangelicalism – as of Chalmers’s own long career in public life – is that a socially conservative faith so firmly rooted in the futility of merit and good works should have its greatest impact in so many areas of practical philanthropy on which it left its indelible mark.

  Prison reform, education, asylums, pauperism, factory hours, drink, Sabbath observance, the abolition of slavery – if there was little that was gloomy in the nineteenth century that evangelicalism was not answerable for then it would equally play its part in almost everything that was good in the public life of the country. Thomas Chalmers was under no illusion as to the immense size of the task facing him in Glasgow, but if there were any doubts this Sunday as he looked down on his Kilmany parishioners – was there one soul there that he had saved? Was Kilmany any closer, after all the years of striving, to the ‘Godly Commonwealth’ of the old Reformation dream? – the life of the evangelical Christian was one of endless struggle and Chalmers was ready for the fight.

  It would be a fight, too, against lukewarm indifference and entrenched class interest on the one hand and bigotry on the other. This Sunday morning, as the congregation of a small Methodist chapel near London’s Red Lion Square prayed for justice for one of their own, the Reverend Mr Cotton, the Newgate Ordinary, was praying for her confession. At the same time that Thomas Chalmers was heading for Glasgow with its great mass of Catholic immigrants, a Roman Catholic priest in the Scottish Highlands, Father John Lamont, denounced by a neighbouring Protestant minister for celebrating a Catholic marriage, was awaiting trial at the next Inverness sessions. And as Thomas Chalmers was awakening the hearts of his Kilmany parishioners to Christian love, an angry Calvinist mob further north on the east coast was gathering in the churchyard to dig up the body of a recently buried suicide. On such a Sunday – in such a divided, suspicious Britain – what could a minister of the Establishment have to offer to the dissenting poor of Glasgow? What could a Presbyterian have to say to the city’s teeming Irish Catholics? What could the transforming message of the gospel mean to those dying in the slums of Glasgow, like William Wheeler’s soldiers, ‘with despair and horrid oaths’ on their lips? What price national regeneration when the ‘fount of royal mercy’ that twenty-two men and women in Newgate’s condemned cells were waiting on – Shelley’s ‘mud from a muddy stream’ – dribbled as sluggishly as it did in Carlton House?

  He was ready though. And so too, five hundred miles to the south, as he made his way between the mouldering graves and burial mound of Taplow’s St Nicholas church, was William Wilberforce. Five years earlier his View of Practical Religion had been the book that had opened Chalmers to the gift of grace and Wilberforce had travelled the same conversion road himself. And twenty years after his own conversion he was still fighting. He had spent that week battling to push a Slave Registration bill through Parliament, only to founder on the same specious arguments, the same entrenched selfishness, the same plantation coteries as always. There would, though, be other bills, and God’s work would finally triumph, and Britain be made worthy of the place in God’s dispensation that had been chosen for her. ‘In the midst of crooked and perverse nations ye shine as lights of the world’ was Mr Moodie of Edinburgh’s text for the day from Philippians, and in Glasgow this Sunday, was not Thomas Campbell, just returned from Africa with his three fellow ministers of the London Missionary Society, preaching and collecting for the African missions? And on a morning such as this, bright again after the rain, what better proof could one have of God’s infinite mercies? ‘Perhaps at this very moment,’ Wilberforce added, turning to his children, ‘when we are walking thus in peace together to the House of God, our brave fellows may be fighting hard in Belgium. Oh how grateful we should be for all God’s goodness to us!’

  12 noon

  Ah, You Don’t Know Macdonell

  From the moment that Wellington chose the ridge at Mont-Saint-Jean to fight his battle, the chateau and outbuildings of Hougoumont were destined to play a crucial role. It is possible that history and myth have exaggerated its strategic significance, but situated as it was, below and in advance of the British right wing, Hougoumont might have been equally designed to ease or aggravate the fears that Wellington had always had for the safety of his right flank.

  Wellington was probably giving Bonaparte more credit for finesse than was his due in fact, because as far as Bonaparte was concerned any flank attack would be launched as nothing but a diversion. On the day before the battle a French advance guard had probed as far as the chateau, but Bonaparte’s battle plan – in so far as he thought one was needed to defeat an inferior army and an inferior general before he ate that night in Brussels – was to force Wellington to draw troops away from the allied centre to reinforce his right before he smashed his way through the middle.

  With his right flank anchored on the village of Braine l’Alleud, a thousand yards to the north and west of Hougoumont, and a division placed around it, Wellington was taking no chances though, and the chateau and its outbuildings formed a key part of his defences. From the north, or allied, side a sunken lane ran at an angle down from the ridge to the chateau gate, which opened in turn on to a walled courtyard, enclosed on the northern and western sides by cowsheds and barn, and dominated on the south side by the handsome facade of the chateau itself.

  Immediately to the right of the chateau was another massive gate, leading through to a second courtyard at the rear of the main building, with more cowsheds and stables along its western range, and the gardener’s house closing it in at its southern end. On the eastern side of the chateau and farm buildings was a large walled garden and orchard, and beyond the whole complex to the south, a wooded park, bounded by hedges and ditches, stretched out towards the left wing of the
French lines.

  It was just as well that Wellington had reinforced these buildings because battles have a way of developing a logic of their own, and from the opening shots of the day Hougoumont took on a significance for both sides beyond its strategic value. The division on the far left of the French line was under the command of Napoleon’s youngest brother Jérôme, but if he had understood the nature of his orders there was not much sign of it, and an attack that was begun as a diversionary feint was allowed to develop into a battle within a battle that would play a major part in the final outcome.

  It would do more than that, as well, because every religion needs its holy places and in Hougoumont the nineteenth-century cult of British military heroism was about to gain one of its bloodiest shrines. On the evening of the 17th, Wellington had deployed four light companies of Guards to secure the buildings and grounds, and at twelve o’clock, as the first of the French skirmishers, fanned out in front of Jérôme’s advancing column, reached the southern edge of the wood, he had something like a thousand men – a mix of dark-green-uniformed German Jägers, a battalion of Nassau troops and the Guards – standing between the enemy and strategic control of the ground in front of the allied right.

  The numbers were in an important sense misleading – the sunken lane, ‘the hollow way’, would allow Wellington to go on reinforcing and resupplying the chateau throughout the day without weakening his centre – but as the Nassauers who had taken a mauling at Quatre Bras broke and fled, the real battle for Hougoumont began. The sheer weight of French numbers took them as far as the garden wall before they were finally driven back, but with the artillery of both sides weighing in, and British shrapnel and howitzers lacerating man and tree indiscriminately, the wood had already changed hands twice more by the time an even more acute threat to Hougoumont began to develop.

  The hours spent overnight and through the long morning wait, throwing up firing platforms, cutting loopholes and barricading gates, had paid dividends, but the overwhelming numerical superiority in artillery had given the French control of ground on either side of the chateau. It was clear even to Prince Jérôme that another frontal assault on the south side would only cost more lives, and sometime between noon and one, about an hour after the opening cannonade, he sent his reinforcements forward along both flanks, driving the heavily outnumbered defenders out of the orchard on the east and sweeping around through the tall crops of the flat ground to the west until they found themselves in the sunken lane and at the north gate.

  On the right of the advance, the attack was halted in ferocious fighting in the hollow way, but it was on the battle for the north gate, the supply line for the allied reinforcements and ammunition, that the mastery of the chateau rested. When the French arrived Colonel James Macdonell’s two companies of Guards were outside the gate, and there was a desperate scramble to get inside the courtyard and bar the gate shut before the French could pour in and overwhelm the chateau’s battered defences.

  ‘Ah, you don’t know Macdonell’ had been Wellington’s laconic response when the Prussian Baron von Muffling had queried his chances of clinging on to Hougoumont, and Macdonell did not let him down. With every moment the threat on the other side of the gate was growing, and when a huge ex-sapper called Legros – ‘l’Enfonceur’, ‘the Smasher’ – succeeded in axing a way through, the battle for Hougoumont, the battle for the allied right, the battle itself, momentarily shrank to the hidden confines of a courtyard enclosed by barn and cowsheds, and to a murderous, brawling, hacking, race to secure the gate again before the rest of the attackers could stream in.

  From the windows of the chateau and the cowshed on the northern flank, from the summits of the garrets, from the depths of the cellars, through air holes and cracks in the masonry – a bloody farmyard rat hunt – the fire poured in on the French as the massive figure of James Macdonell battled his way back towards the gate. There might have been a hundred attackers already inside the courtyard at this moment, but the real danger lay with those still outside and with the French pushing one way, and Macdonell and a handful of Coldstreams the other, the great heavy wooden gates of the north door were somehow forced shut and barred.

  Hougoumont had been saved – ‘the success of the Battle of Waterloo depended on the closing of the gates of Hougoumont,’ declared an unusually theatrical Wellington – and from the chateau steps and the wicket gate into the garden, to the covered well and cowsheds on its northern side, Legros and his company lay dead. On the other side of the gates there was one last abortive attempt to scale the courtyard wall, but as the killing within slackened and the isolated besiegers outside in their turn became the besieged, only a solitary French drummer boy, carried inside the chateau by an English private to save his life, survived to show how close run a thing it had been.

  In the orchard to the east of the courtyard, now back again in allied hands, the bodies of Lord Saltoun’s Guards, Germans and French attackers lay jumbled together. In the hollow way behind, the French dead and dying marked the farthest limit of Jérôme’s offensive as, across to the west, French Tirailleurs dissolved into the long corn. It was not the end of the attacks on Hougoumont – they would continue all through the day, squandering lives with a wanton and useless profligacy – but it was as near as it would ever come to falling. The north door was again in allied hands, the sunken road again an English thoroughfare, and Wellington free to think about the rest of his battle.

  The indomitable James Macdonell, the younger brother of Alexander Macdonell of Glengarry, the violent and pantomime Highland chieftain of Walter Scott’s dreaming and Raeburn’s portrait … Harry Wyndham, a younger son of the Earl of Egremont … Ensign Gooch … Harvey … Corporal James Graham from County Monaghan, the ‘bravest man in England’ as he was known – apart from Colonel Macdonell, none of these could expect to find their way into Wellington’s despatch, but these were the names, the men who had closed the north door, that would resonate down the century and out of which a mythology of nationhood was forged.

  And Hougoumont itself. The tall, ripening fields of Waterloo, cut down in their swathes by cannonball and cavalry, might serve their turn as an easy poetic metaphor, but in the physical destruction of Hougoumont, in the blasted trees of its park and the lacerated branches of the orchard, an anthropomorphised, wounded nature seemed to have shared in the suffering and sacrifice of its defenders. ‘The dead and the wounded positively covered the whole area of the orchard,’ wrote an awed Gronow, ‘not less than two thousand men had fallen there. The apple-trees presented a singular appearance; shattered branches were seen hanging about their mother trunks in such profusion that one might almost suppose the stiff-growing and stunted tree had been converted into a willow: every tree was riddled and smashed in a manner which told that the showers of shot had been incessant. On this spot I lost some of my dearest and bravest friends, and the country had to mourn many of its most heroic sons slain here.’ A corner of a foreign field had become forever England.

  1 p.m.

  Never Such a Period as This

  One of the first things that any stranger coming into London from the countryside would have noticed was that nobody noticed him. It would have been pretty well impossible to pass through an English village unremarked, but as the young American visitor George Ticknor told his father, London was an exhilaratingly anonymous place, a city – a new Rome, a new Babylon, a ‘Nation’ in itself the essayist, and addict, Thomas De Quincey insisted – of a million men and women, too poor, too rich, too wretched, too modest, too busy or too preoccupied with their own lives to take much notice of anyone else’s.

  At just about the same time as Ticknor was making his way to the publisher John Murray’s in Albemarle Street, and Henry Crabb Robinson was threading a path towards the Wordsworths’ lodgings in Marylebone, the Quaker banker, philanthropist and translator of Homer, Charles Lloyd, was walking to the Bedford Coffee House in Covent Garden. He had spent that morning at the meeting house in Westminster whe
re Priscilla Gurney had spoken, and for an affectionate family man who was never at ease away from his wife in Birmingham – ‘I wish thou wert with me … I am not formed to dwell alone’ he told her – he was feeling unusually ‘quiet’ and at ‘home’ among the Gurneys and the Hanburys and the Barclays and the Allens of London’s tight-knit, intermarried Quaker community.

  If Sunday 18 June seems a curious day to feel unusually ‘quiet’ – and Bonaparte’s tumultuous ‘Hundred Days’ the last thing that anyone but a Quaker could describe as a ‘time of much unction and great dominion of the truth’ – it perhaps goes some way to explaining the absence of any real moral opposition to the renewal of war. In the weeks before the campaign opened there had been any amount of anger in radical circles, but the one voice that seems curiously muted among all the hyperbole of Byron and Hazlitt or the self-interested indignation of Liverpool merchants was the one voice that could legitimately command the moral high ground: that of the Quaker community.

  It had not always been the case, and certainly not so with the Lloyd family of Birmingham. The Lloyds had originally come to England from mid-Wales in the time of Charles II, and within a generation a family that had paid for their religious convictions with ten years in a fetid Welshpool gaol had become one of the country’s leading manufacturers, making their fortunes and reputation in the iron industry before turning, in the mid-1760s, to the banking business that still carries their name.

  In 1815 ‘Charles Lloyd the Banker’, as he was commonly known – his son ‘Charles Lloyd the Poet’, the nervy, depressive protégé of Coleridge had been among Lamb’s guests the previous evening – was sixty-seven years old, a businessman of energy, culture, probity and talent. From the bank’s foundation the Quakers’ reputation for honesty had given the Lloyds a natural advantage, and in the fifty years since Sampson Lloyd had set up his bank with the great ‘Shakespeare and Newton’ of the Birmingham button trade, John Taylor, the family had continued to prosper, placing the Lloyds squarely at the heart of the economic, cultural, scientific, philosophical, religious and philanthropic lives of Britain’s most dynamic, creative manufacturing centre.