Went the Day Well? Read online

  No one was more gentle or self-effacingly ‘feminine’ than Mary in her sane periods – the only woman of complete sense he had ever known, William Hazlitt claimed – and no one more brilliant or abandoned in her madness. It would have been less disquieting had their friends been able to see her insanity as something utterly unconnected with her ‘real’ personality, but nobody who heard her ravings – brilliant disjointed flashes of wit, sparkling jewels wrenched from their settings – could doubt that she was never so free as when she was in her straitjacket and never so restrained as when well.

  Even for the most seasoned Lamb-watcher, in fact, it was hard to be sure who was looking after whom in Hare Court, or who had sacrificed most to create one, indivisible being out of the wreckage of their damaged lives, but no household in London ever attracted more loyal friends. For those who did not know the history of mental illness there was always something inexplicably odd about Charles, but for his discreet and inner circle of devotees, his defensive carapace of jokes and puns and antique flights of humour, eccentricities, reckless bursts of levity and bouts of helpless drunkenness – the ‘between the acts’ of his ‘distressful drama’ as he engagingly called them – only added a note of vulnerability that bound them even more protectively to him.

  There were more glamorous, more distinguished, more powerful literary salons and coteries to be found in London – the room above Murray’s bookshop in Albemarle Street where, under the malignant Thomas Gifford, the Tory Quarterly was hatched; the great Whig Holland House set where Sydney Smith sang for his supper – but nowhere could you meet with such a mixed crowd of people as at Lamb’s. If Charles Lamb had any politics they were certainly on the liberal side of the debate, but that had never stopped his friends spanning the full gamut of political opinion, from Utopian revolutionaries-turned-Tories such as Southey, Coleridge or Wordsworth at one end of the spectrum, to the likes of Hazlitt, Godwin, Leigh Hunt and the radical journalist and satirist William Hone at the other.

  The Lambs’ was also the place where the age of Johnson met the age of Dickens and Browning in its embryonic state, and for Crabb Robinson this was its great charm. Robinson knew that the two great ‘beasts’ in the Lamb menagerie would not be there tonight, but he was seeing Wordsworth for breakfast in the morning, and in some ways it was easier when he was not there, less high-minded and, somehow – Robinson hated to let anything cloud his admiration of the man he recognised as the greatest poet since Milton – less constrained by the presence and dues of genius.

  Coleridge was away too, in Wiltshire, writing – or at least talking, as only Coleridge could talk – and Hunt would be busy at the Examiner’s office deep into the night; but so long as there could be one evening without Hazlitt and talk of Bonaparte, Robinson did not mind who else was there. He was painfully conscious that he got the worst of an argument with Hazlitt over the whist tables the last time they had met, and for a barrister it was doubly galling to be bested by a man ‘who was not just wrong but offensive in almost all he said’. ‘When pressed he does not deny what is bad in the character of Buonaparte,’ he had confided to his diary that night, part in anger, part in sadness at their parting of ways, ‘and yet he triumphs and rejoices in the late events. Hazlitt and myself once felt alike on politics, and now our hopes and fears are directly opposed. Hazlitt is angry with the friends of liberty for weakening their strength by going with the common foe against Buonaparte … Hazlitt says: “Let the enemy of old tyrannical governments triumph, I am glad, and I do not much care how the new government turns out … His hatred, and my fears, predominate and absorb all weaker impressions.”’

  There seemed to be no one, in fact, that Hazlitt had not offended these last weeks – Charles Burney over the review of his sister Fanny’s latest novel, Wordsworth with his attack in last week’s Examiner, Hunt who had been forced to disown the article – but not even Hazlitt could spoil the pleasure Robinson always felt as he made his way up the steep flights of stairs to the Lambs’ chambers. He was probably too late now to take a hand of whist but after the recent hash he had made of his cards that was probably no bad thing, and it was only deep into the evening, when they were done with cards and the tables put away, and the drink had begun to do its work, that the place came fully alive in all its strange, unruly charm.

  The Lambs’ Temple garret was a warren of small, shabby rooms under the roof and two sitting rooms on the third floor below. Charles Lamb had set aside the smaller of the rooms for a library so grimy that Robinson could never bring himself to go in, but the ‘state room’ would be looking as it always did for one of their soirées, with their old, petted servant Becky loading the sideboards with food and porter, while Mary glided in her quiet, measured way among the party and Charles – his hair, as black at forty as at twenty, the one grey and one brown eye already bright with fun and battle – sat like some diminutive, half-tipsy Quaker under the low, smoke-stained ceiling among his Hogarth prints, with his forbidden brandy and forbidden tobacco, and talked and stammered and joked and punned and drank to keep at bay the demons that no talk could hold off for ever.

  Even by Charles Lamb’s standards, Robinson thought, they were an odd lot that evening: old Burney talking whist as if he had never watched Captain Cook being murdered or abandoned his wife for his sister; the poet Charles Lloyd, holding on to his sanity by 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 t
he 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 the Netherlands, very much in question, an allied defeat in Flanders – and a defeat, especially, for the British paymasters whose gold was financing the coalition armies – opened up all sorts of potential political dreams.

  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.