by David Crane
The whole plan, of course, depended on an ‘untimely end’ for one or more of his friends, but then at that age, as he engagingly put it, ‘on ne doute de rien’, and ‘so I set about thinking how I should manage to get my outfit, in order to appear at Brussels in a manner worthy of the aide-de-camp of the great general’. As his ‘funds’ were at a characteristically ‘low ebb’ at the time, Gronow negotiated a loan from ‘those staunch friends of the hard-up soldier’ Cox and Greenwood’s, and armed with their £200, turned it ‘by some wonderful accident’ at a St James’s Square gambling house into £800, and thus well equipped with ‘the sinews of war’, splashed out on a pair of first-rate horses from Tattersalls and embarked for Ostend and the seat of war with his groom.
He could have made himself another tidy profit if he had had the time and funds – in the London clubs they were offering three-to-one on an allied victory – but by the 11th he was down at Ramsgate and five days later with Picton and his suite at Brussels. They had only arrived on the morning of the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, and Gronow had barely time to put in an essentially decorative appearance at Quatre Bras before caution and his old friend Chambers suggested that he should sell the aide-de-camp’s horse he had picked up at Tattersalls and resume the life of an honest infantryman before he found himself in an even bigger scrape.
It was probably a wise move – only a supreme optimist like Gronow could have thought Sir Thomas Picton’s side was the best place to be in battle – and even a frosty welcome from the Guards’ colonel seemed a small price to pay for the pleasures of such a perfect Sunday morning. The Guards had been positioned on the right of the British centre, and from where Gronow now found himself he had the whole of the battlefield spread out in front of him, with the allied troops stretched out on either side in ‘a continuous wall of human beings’ and the ‘long imposing lines of the enemy distinctly visible’ across the shallow valley only a thousand yards away.
It was the first and last time anyone that day would see Wellington’s ‘ballroom’ and ‘ball’ in their entirety before the one disappeared into smoke and the other dissolved into a hundred thousand fragmentary and contradictory impressions. Wellington had drawn his troops up on the reverse slope of a low but pronounced ridge bisected by the main Brussels–Charleroi road. From one end of the line to the other was a distance of about two miles. Along it ran a lane, deeply sunken in parts and bordered by hedges, which led to Ohain in the east and to Braine l’Alleud in the west. In front of this lane at the far left of the allied position stood the buildings of Papelotte; at the centre, and lying on the west side of the Brussels road some three hundred yards below the Ohain crossroads, the farm of La Haye Sainte; and at the right of the allied army, below and in advance of the ridge, the walled chateau, outbuildings, garden, wood and orchard of Hougoumont.
Across the valley, covered in its tall summer crops, which sloped gently down from the Ohain road and then rose again towards the inn of La Belle Alliance on the Brussels road less than a mile away, were the French. Their line too stretched in a mirror image from Papelotte on their far right to the open ground to the south of Hougoumont on their left. Behind them, in the centre, lay the village of Plancenoit and almost two miles to the east, in the direction of Wavre, the Bois de Paris. ‘On the opposite heights we could perceive large dark moving masses of something impossible to distinguish individually,’ wrote Edmund Wheatley of the King’s German Legion, standing in solid square to the rear of La Haye Sainte and to the left of Gronow, ‘where the edge of the ground bound the horizon, shoals of these gloomy bodies glided down, disjointing then contracting, like fields of animated clouds sweeping over the plains, like melted lava from a volcano, boding ruin and destruction to whatever dared impede its course. It had a fairy look and border’d on the supernatural.’
In the French army were 69,000 men, including 14,000 cavalry, and 250 guns; on the allied side 67,000 men, just 24,000 of whom were British, with 11,000 cavalry and just over 150 guns. Within four square miles, then, were 140,000 men and 400 guns, and for the moment they were silent. The rain had turned the ground between the two armies into a quagmire, neutering the effective use of artillery or cavalry until it dried, and stretching out the long wait for battle deep into the morning. Already, though, as the two armies waited, the Waterloo ball was fragmenting again into its thousand shifting perspectives. There, on the far left of the French line, opposite where the young George Keppel stood thinking of his father’s story and the immortal words of the Game Chicken, were clearly visible Jérôme Bonaparte and his suite. And there, farther to the right, a small, remote figure, surrounded by his staff, mounted on a white horse. ‘How often,’ thought Captain Mercer of the horse artillery, as the roars of ‘Vive l’Empereur’ rolled across the valley towards the allied ridge, had he ‘longed to see Napoleon, that mighty man of war – that astonishing genius who has filled the world with renown.’
Now he had his wish, but Keppel was not the only one wishing that it was fit. Close to Wheatley stood a ‘swelled-faced, ignorant booby, raw from England, staring with haggard and pallid cheek on the swarm of foes over against him. One could perceive,’ Wheatley remembered, ‘the torture of his feelings by the hectic quivering of his muscles, as if fear and cold were contending for the natural colour of the cheek.’ Farther back in reserve a young and unblooded private, Bartram of the 40th, wet and cold after a night bivouacking in the forest of Soignes, was too terrified to move while elsewhere fear had already given way to a soldier’s superstitious fatalism. The Duke of Brunswick’s premonitions had proved right and Thomas Picton, dressed in his old blue coat and black hat, his broken ribs bandaged from a musket ball at Quatre Bras, was not the only one who knew he was going to die. ‘Tom, you are an old soldier, and have escaped often,’ a new, young recruit, an Edinburgh lad in the 71st, was saying, ‘I am sure I am to fall … I am certain … All I ask is that you tell my parents when you get home that I ask God’s pardon for the evil I have done and the grief I have given them. Be sure to tell I died praying for their blessing and pardon.’
How many were praying, God knows, but if they were, they were praying alone. There were a few harmless Methodists among the Guards, who the duke tolerated without much liking, but they were the exception. It was a Sunday, and yet it could have been any day of the week for all the difference that made. ‘I have often heard the remark,’ William Wheeler once told his family, ‘that a Chaplain is of no more use than a town pump without a handle,’ and as the Reverend Stonestreet, Chaplain of the Guards, busied himself back in Brussels cashing a cheque for £40 there were few at the front likely to have disagreed.
Prayers, though, there were. Of thanks: ‘For the second time I go to take to the field,’ Captain John Blackman of the Guards, another old Westminster boy who had fought his way up through Spain, had written home, ‘and I pray once again for that Divine Protection hitherto so bountifully & so undeservedly bestowed upon me; and you may rest assured the wholesome instruction I received in my youth from yourself and my very dear Mother will ever remain implanted in my breast.’ For a wife, in the case of Augustus Frazer, writing a last letter home at three that morning, his mind ‘tranquil and composed’. Of gratitude – for such a glorious day to fight – if it was Gronow. For a parent’s forgiveness; even, in some obscure way – Yeats a century before Yeats – for a different kind of forgiveness or understanding. ‘It is an awful situation to be in,’ Wheatley mused, a British officer among ‘heavy, selfish’ soldiers of the King’s German Legion for whom he felt nothing and fellow countrymen he did not know, and faced with an enemy he did not hate, ‘to stand with a sharp-edged instrument at one’s side, waiting for the signal to drag it out of its peaceful innocent house to snap the thread of existence of those we never saw, never spoke to, never offended. On the opposite ascent stand hundreds of young men like myself … and yet with all my soul I wished them dead as the earth they trampled on and anticipated their total annihilation.’
Ni
ne miles away to the north, as the armies waited, the citizens of an edgy, frightened Brussels were taking the caricatures and satires against Bonaparte out of their windows and readying themselves for another change of rule. In her Antwerp room, farther again to the north, Magdalene De Lancey, nerves stretched to breaking, was listening while a Captain Mitchell broke the news that there was to be another battle. In her old chamber in the Laboureur Inn, the black-plumed and uniformed Brunswickers stood guard over the corpse of their chief, while far over to the east, on the French–Swiss border, Byron’s friend and the source of The Examiner’s French intelligence, John Cam Hobhouse, was wondering what was happening to his brother in the 69th. He did not know him as well as he should have done and felt guilty about that. He had gone to see him on his way to Paris, where he had rushed when he first heard of the escape of his hero Bonaparte. His brother had shown him the grapeshot mark in his cap, with its two neat holes, entrance and exit, collected at the disastrous assault on Bergen-op-Zoom the year before. ‘It will be lower down next time,’ he had told him and he had been right. As Hobhouse stood at the Morez border post, this Sunday morning, waiting to cross into Switzerland, and struggled to square family and political feelings, his brother, shot through the neck, lay as dead as the Duke of Brunswick in a Quatre Bras grave. It was ‘strange’, thought Private Dixon Vallance of the 79th, a battalion that had already been brutally mauled on the 16th, ‘that two of the most powerful and civilised nations, ranked foremost in every department of knowledge, science and art, found no other way of settling their differences, than the old and barbarous method of going to war and killing each other’.
He might as well have been in Leigh Hunt’s box of lilies. It had been too late for thoughts like that from the moment that Vienna had declared Bonaparte the enemy of mankind. ‘A ball’ suddenly ‘whizzed in the air’ and Wheatley looked at his watch. ‘It was just eleven o’clock, Sunday morning,’ and as ‘a stunning noise’ shook the air and ‘a shocking havoc commenced’, Wheatley found himself thinking that his fiancée, ‘Eliza, would just be going into church at Wallingford’.
11 a.m.
The Sabbath
At just about the same time that Edmund Wheatley was taking out his watch and thinking of Eliza, a man in his mid-fifties, with a mild, almost winsome sweetness of expression, and something of the frail, oddly stooped and birdlike air of the permanent valetudinarian, was making his slow way up the hill to Taplow church. He had only arrived from town late the previous evening, and as he paused to look about him in the bright morning sunshine, the ‘dust and bustle of the city’ forgotten, the Thames gleaming in the valley far below the ancient Norman church and its still more ancient Saxon burial mound, he turned to his children and called on them ‘to rejoice in the visible goodness of his God’.
William Wilberforce and his family were going to worship, and if his was perhaps an insensitive celebration from a man whose Society for the Suppression of Vice had dedicated so much of its energies to ensuring that the lower orders would not enjoy their Sundays, men, women and children across the country were doing the same. In his private chapel in Carlton House, the fount of royal mercy was at prayer with his brother, the Duke of Cumberland, and in churches and chapels and meeting houses and open fields up and down Britain, Anglicans and Episcopalians, Methodists, Congregationalists and Unitarians, Moderates and High-Flyers, Secessionists, Presbyterians and Reformed Presbyterians, Old Licht Burgher and Old Anti-Licht Burghers, New Licht Burghers and New Anti-Licht Burghers, Quakers, Roman Catholics and every conceivable shade of Dissenter were coming stubbornly together to worship their God in their way.
There is nothing quite like a Sabbath to bring out the divisions and fissures in a Christian nation and Sunday 18 June was no exception. In the cathedral at Antwerp this morning Thomas Musgrave – a young Cambridge junior fellow and future Archbishop of York – was eavesdropping on the ladies’ confessions and thanking God that he had been born a Protestant, but beyond a deep antipathy to Roman Catholicism that linked Church and Chapel in a common bond, the British Sunday, in all its theological, social, cultural, emotional and political variety, was as much a celebration of difference as it was of national unity.
After the long latitudinarian slumber of the eighteenth century, religion was on the march and nowhere more so than in the remote village of Kilmany in northern Fife. ‘In my last I attempted to awaken the heart. In my present I shall attempt to give direction to the awakened’ – the minister’s accent was a ‘broad and vulgar’ Scots, the language ‘negligent and coarse’, but none of this had ever mattered in the impassioned rush of words and emotion that for the last four turbulent years had spilled down like ‘fragments of burning mountains’ from the Kilmany pulpit. ‘For you will observe’ – the periods would roll on, the heavily lidded, almost somnolent eyes light up with a strange ‘watery glare’, the arms flail the air, the feet stamp out the rhythm of the sentences like some half-demented weaver, ‘that a man may long feel uneasy, and anxious for deliverance, and yet be at a loss how to go about it … He may feel haunted by remorse and a strong overpowering sentiment that all is not right about him – but the darkness of nature is over him and he cannot command light to arise in the midst of it – and he remains in gloomy and obstinate alienation from God – with no success in his attempts at the exercise of faith – no comfort in his prayers – no progress in his seeking after the face of a reconciled Father.’
The name of the minister was Thomas Chalmers – preacher, social reformer, ecclesiastical wrecking ball, and a man whose life and career might stand as a paradigm of the age itself. Chalmers had been born at Anstruther on the east coast of Scotland thirty-five years before, and after an education at St Andrews which had taken him closer to atheism than to Calvin, had been ordained into the Church of Scotland at a time when its dominant ‘Moderates’ party had ossified into little more than Henry Dundas’s Tory interest ‘at prayer’.
As a young man of wide secular interests, more interested in science and philosophy than theology, Chalmers had found a natural home among the Moderates and might well have stayed there without the event that four years earlier had changed his life and with it the future of the Church of Scotland. In his early years at Kilmany he had approached his ministry in much the same spirit that any unenthusiastic Moderate would have done, but in the spring of 1811 something happened to him, and an inextricable mesh of emotional, physical and spiritual factors combined to produce in him one of those sudden and total conversion experiences that were so beloved of evangelical tract writers. ‘On the fast day,’ a minister’s widow from the nearby village of Dairsie celebrated it in the classic conversion language of the time, ‘we had a new miracle of Divine grace, in a Mr Chalmers of Kilmany, a great philosopher, but once an enemy avowedly to the peculiar doctrines of the gospel. For a year back the Lord has been teaching him by the rod … and now he comes forward to preach the faith which he once destroyed, and I trust we glorify God in him.’
It would be impertinent even to think of judging the nature of Chalmers’s conversion, and if it is always tempting to understand it in human rather than theological terms – blighted love, family tragedy, disappointed ambition, physical illness and mental stress would all seem to have played their part – its impact was immediate and profound. In a notorious pamphlet Chalmers had once insisted that a parish minister could do all that had to be done in two days a week, but from the date of the ‘miracle’ he was a man reborn, overseeing parish and Sunday schools, Bible Society and Mission meetings in a programme of pastoral visitations, moral and secular instruction, practical charity, Bible lectures and preaching for which seven days in a week had never proved enough.
At the heart of his pastoral mission was the pulpit, though even those who knew him best could never understand quite what it was that would make Thomas Chalmers the most famous preacher of his age. There was nothing very remarkable in his conversation around a dinner table or even in his printed sermons, but rai
se him high above a congregation in a pulpit, the fount of moral authority where all the warring elements of his complex, passionate, dominant character came into alignment, and he could empty the streets of Glasgow or pack a London church so full that he could only climb in himself by a window. Did they think, he implored his Kilmany congregation this Sunday morning, that because they had not yet found Christ, there was nothing to do? Did those who heard Isaiah do nothing because salvation was not yet at hand? Did the ‘publicans and harlots and soldiers and men of avarice’ who listened to John preaching continue in sin because Christ was not yet come? No, ‘even before salvation had actually come and before righteousness was actually revealed – there was a part for these people to take, and by taking this part they prepared themselves for greater things which were to follow and put themselves in a likelier way for receiving the benefit of them, than if they had delivered themselves up to idleness and refused to do anything’.
It was not an intellectually challenging sermon that he was giving this Sunday morning, but then this was not a show of theological pyrotechnics, but the final exhortations of a pastor saying farewell to the parish where he had discovered his faith. In his earlier, careless years in Kilmany he had naturally looked beyond its narrow boundaries to the political, literary and religious worlds of Edinburgh, Glasgow and London, and even after conversion a deep conviction of miserable worthlessness had never quite stifled a sense of his own abilities or an ambition that the narrow world of a remote rural parish was never likely to satisfy.