by David Crane
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.
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?’
It was a wonderfully nineteenth-century thought that the two things might be opposites – another prince dressed in black had very little trouble squaring them – and Wellington for one would have settled for something more barbarous than the army of young boys that Brunswick had brought with him. In the weeks since arriving in the Belgian capital, Wellington had complained endlessly of the ‘infamous army’ he had been given to do the job, but by the time it had at last become clear that the French advance towards Quatre Bras and Brussels was not a feint, he was in no position to pick and choose whether it was his old Peninsula veterans or the raw and untested Brunswickers who would get him out of the fix he had got himself into.
That had been late on Thursday 15th, and that night anyway the duke had other things to do. He must have known as well as anyone that Bonaparte’s brilliant advance had not shown him at his best, but he had promised the Duchess of Richmond she could have her ball (‘Duchess, you may give your ball with the greatest safety, without fear of interruption,’ he had superbly told her) and he was damned if anything the French did now was going to show him up for a fool.
He had his other reasons for going to the Richmond ball that night, or would find them with hindsight – morale, psychology, a show of British sang-froid, a ‘marker’ for wavering Belgians – but the answer was probably no more complicated than pride. Throughout his career he had had to live with the carping of opposition politicians who hated the Wellesleys, and yet it was a very long time – probably the Siege of Seringapatam in the spring of 1799 and his first major battle – since he had had to justify or explain himself to his own officers and he had no intention of doing anything to undermine the extraordinary hold he had over them now.
‘Nobody can guess Lord Wellington’s intentions,’ Uxbridge’s sister Lady Caroline Capel had written just a week earlier, ‘& I dare say Nobody will know he is going till he is actually gone.’ If the women of Brussels did not know what he was doing then certainly no one else was going to. For an old Peninsula-hand like Sir Augustus Frazer there was nothing new in this, but for those who had never been around the duke before, there was something almost shocking in the dominance he exerted over officers who in any other situation and under anyone else were figures of substance in their own right. ‘Our movements are kept in the greatest secrecy. We know nothing that is going on,’ the Reverend George Stonestreet, the most unmilitary of Guards’ chaplains, wrote from 1st Division Headquarters to his brother-in-law, a broker in the City always keen for his own reasons to know what was happening in Belgium. ‘General Officers, even those commanding divisions are kept in ignorance by the great Duke … I am astonished to find the fear which
exists, of at all offending the Duke; and the implicit submission and humility with which Men of talent courage and character shrink before his abrupt, hurried and testy manner.’
If anyone knew what was on his mind it was likely to be his latest dalliance, the pale and anorexically thin Byron cast-off, Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster, but it would have taken a brave man to have asked the duke what he was doing at the ball. Lord Fitzroy Somerset, Wellington’s secretary, had not understood why the army had not marched immediately that Thursday afternoon, but when it came to the point he was no bolder than the rest, tamely conceding that ‘as it was the place where every British officer of rank was likely to be found, perhaps for that reason the Duke dressed & went there’.
He was right in that at least, almost everyone but the De Lanceys was there. And if it might have been argued – and it was in angry Whig and opposition circles – that Wellington’s officers might have been better off with their regiment, nothing so vividly encapsulates the strange air of unreality that marked these last days before Waterloo. It was here at a rented house in the rue de Blanchisserie in the early hours of the 16th, as Wellington sat on a sofa and talked with Lady Dalrymple Hamilton, and the Duke of Brunswick gave a sudden, violent shudder of premonition, and Gordon Highlanders demonstrated their reels to the duchess’s guests, that the cumulative oddity of what would soon be dubbed ‘the 100 Days’ took on the surreal, climactic air of a macabre Regency Dance of Death. ‘There was the sound of revelry by night,’ Byron famously would write,
And Belgium’s capital had gather’d there
Her Beauty and her Chivalry, and bright
The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men;
A thousand hearts beat happily; and when