by David Crane
It was a long way from the heroic resistance of the Welsh Lloyds and the foul straw bedding of Welshpool gaol, and in the gradual accommodation of Quaker ideals and separateness to a more accepting world something had been lost. In many ways the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a golden age of Quaker philanthropy, but for all the dedication of such men as Fowell Buxton or Charles Lloyd himself to the abolitionist cause, the gradual transition from outsider to insider, compounded by twenty years of war, had made it increasingly difficult for the Quakers’ prosperous business community to square the circle of principle and profit.
They could go on addressing each other as ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ and intermarry – the Gurneys, the Frys, the Barclays, the Hanburys – but they could not be in the world and not of it in a great manufacturing centre like Birmingham that made everything from the slave owner’s shackles to the army’s guns. The Lloyds’ fortunes in the iron industry had been made in the manufacture of nails by a technique smuggled out of Sweden, and yet even among the Friends it was hard to see what possible moral distinction separated the arms manufacturer from the banker who lubricated the town’s trade or helped finance the government’s war. ‘I am convinced by my feelings and my reason that the manufacture of arms implies no approbation of offensive war,’ one sword manufacturer, Samuel Galton protested, when Birmingham’s Quaker community, alarmed at the charges of hypocrisy levelled against them, called him to public account for his family’s business; ‘Will any person for a moment suppose that as a manufacturer it is my object to encourage the principle or practice of war, or that I propose to myself any other end than that which all other commercial persons propose; the acquisition of property? … Is the farmer who sows barley, the brewer who makes it into a beverage, the merchant who imports rum, responsible for the intemperance, the disease, the vice, and misery which may ensue from their abuse?’
In another and stricter generation the answer might well have been ‘yes’, but for the Quaker who subscribed to government loans or happily paid the land or malt tax that were levied for the payment of the army, life was not so simple. The censures and laws of the Society of Friends were just as strict against the practice of war as slavery, Galton reminded his accusers, and if they were going to carry ‘speculative principles into strict and rigid practice’ then they had better abstain not just from the consumption of West Indian commodities – from rum, tobacco, rice, cotton, indigo, all of them the products ‘and the very ground of slavery’ – but ‘from all commodities which are taxed … for you may be well assured that every morsel of bread you eat and every cup of beer you drink has furnished the resources for carrying on this war, which you so justly censure’.
This was not an easy challenge to meet, especially in a community increasingly inclined to accept earthly prosperity as a token of divine favour, and perhaps in this summer of 1815, the muted response of the Society to the resumption of war is not the surprise it ought to be. It was probably no coincidence that the ‘Church and Throne’ mob who burned the Unitarian Joseph Priestley’s books in 1791 had spared the Quaker Lloyds, and twenty-odd years later – twenty years of total war that had absorbed the energies of the whole nation – the Friends’ disapproval of killing scarcely seemed to rise above a kind of inward spiritual self-absorption and a ‘noli me tangere’ detachment from the outside world.
There was nothing complacent about Charles Lloyd, none of the moral smugness that creeps into the Quaker reformer Elizabeth Fry’s journal for these months, but there was no more sense in his letters to his wife of horizons beyond the self-contained world of the Friends. As a good Quaker he hated the ‘carnage’ of war and as a good banker he deplored the crippling cost of renewed hostilities, but even though he had shared the coach down from Birmingham with an ‘agreeable’ gentleman of sixty who had been imprisoned in France for eleven years and his handsome young wife – ‘at least I thought she was his wife as he called her my dear and she had a ring on her finger’ – this Sunday in London, war and France seemed a long way away. ‘I found a most kind reception at my nephew Hanbury’s,’ he wrote home chattily, as if no news could compete with the movements of their Quaker friends or with the comfort of his Gower Street accommodation: ‘His second son Robert … went with me to Westminster meeting this morning, where I met several of my Friends – Anne Buxton & Priscilla Gurney were there; the latter preached a short feeling sermon … My Nephew Robert tells me that the young man … who was so violently in love with Sarah Buxton was a very nice youth, and had acquired a large fortune, he had been refused by her before he went abroad, but still indulged hopes – on his return he resumed his addresses, and wrote to her, she answered the letter, so as not to deprive him of all hopes, tho’ very distantly, he wrote again and then a positive denial – this affected him extremely, and he was soon after taken ill, but unfortunately said nothing could restore him, but Sarah’s favour, and when delirious he called on her, & at length he earnestly requested to see her, but he was dead 3 hours before her arrival – it is a very moving tale. My Nephew Robert says he believed Catherine Gurney is turned a Catholic but this I think must be a mistake …’
If the heroic Quaker age of Penn and Fox and Lloyd of Dolobran was well and truly over, a mile or so to the north-west of the Bedford Coffee House this Sunday morning a new heroic age was waiting to be born. Over the last few days Benjamin Haydon had been working feverishly on the canvas of Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem that was going to raise British art to a new high, and if he had stopped now – midway through painting the arm of his Centurion – it was only because the thought of what might be happening in Flanders made it impossible for either Haydon or his model, Sammons, to concentrate on anything else.
Sammons was a corporal in the 2nd Life Guards and, like the young Gronow, had been left behind when his regiment embarked for Belgium. There had been real doubts among the rest of the army out there whether the Life Guards would prove anything more than ‘decorative’ when it came to a real fight, but even in the murky demi-monde of London, where a ‘Piccadilly Butcher’ was as likely to be found with a visiting Irish bishop in the Haymarket’s White Lion Tavern as on more orthodox ceremonial duties, it would have taken a brave man to tell Sammons that. ‘Sammons was a favourite model, a living Ilissus’ – the great River God figured in the Parthenon’s West Pediment – Haydon wrote of him, ‘a soldier in every sense of the word. He would have brought a million safe and sound from Portsmouth to the King’s Mint, but he popped his hand into King Joseph’s coaches at Vittoria and brought away a silver pepper pot. He was an old satyr, very like Socrates in face, faithful to me, his colonel, and his King; but let a pretty girl come in the way and the Lord have mercy on her.’
Captain Bontein might have preferred the idea of Gretna Green and his fourteen-year-old heiress to the Low Countries, but Sammons had been like a caged animal since his regiment had sailed. It had seemed inconceivable to him that the army could think of fighting without him, and if it was not bad enough to be left behind when there were boys going who had never seen active service, it was worse still when for all he knew Haydon’s other models – Jack Shaw, Corporal Dakin, the model for the drunken groom in his Macbeth, and, ‘finest of all, six feet four inches, a perfect Achilles’, Private Hodgson might be charging the enemy at this very moment.
It was almost impossible, in the usual course of events, to distract Benjamin Haydon from his art – not even the death of his father had dragged him from his Judgement of Solomon – but between Sammons and his own fevered excitement there was no going on. In 1814 he had been among the first of that great exodus of the rich, the curious and the indigent who had flocked across the Channel at the end of the long war with France, but even the excitement of those heady Paris weeks with David Wilkie, the thrill of seeing with his own starved eyes the great Masters in the Louvre he had only known in prints – the prickling fear of tramping those streets and squares where the tempestuous history of the last twenty years had been w
ritten in blood – the Lilliputian awe as he had tiptoed through the very apartments where the Great Ogre himself, the ‘Apollyon of Revelations’ the ‘wonderful Napoleon who had snatched the crown from the hands of the Pope to put it on his own head’, had eaten and slept and snuffed out candles and pulled bell ropes, was nothing to the sense now of living through great events.
‘In the history of the world never was there such a period as this,’ declared Haydon, and he thanked God he was there to share in its glory and its drama. As a young boy growing up in Plymouth he had slashed and carved his way through poppy fields of imaginary Frenchmen, and for the last three months he had been in a fever of excitement, dreaming of this day and of an England raised to new pinnacles in the arts of war and peace by the triple triumphs of Wellington, Nelson and Benjamin Haydon.
No one had a greater sense of his destiny than Haydon, no one so bitter a hatred of all those who would thwart it, and with God’s help the canvas he had on stretchers in his Marlborough Street studio this Sunday was the work that would add lustre to the name that the sword would win for Britain. In the years since he had first come up to London there had been many more rebuffs than triumphs, but every setback was an angry spur to Haydon, every rejection only another proof that the whole corrupt, jealous cabal of British art – Academicians, teachers, critics, connoisseurs, patrons, ‘the learned despots of dinner parties’, foreigners, the royals, anyone and everyone who had ever questioned his genius – had to be swept away as Christ had driven the money-lenders out of the Temple.
With his massive domed head and piercing eyes he certainly looked the part – and played and sounded it too – and if Benjamin Haydon could only have painted half as well as he wrote his life and British art would have been very different. There was no diarist of the period who could match the vividness and immediacy of Haydon, but if he was a David Wilkie with a pen in hand, a born genre painter in words, full of narrative and detail, of personalities and grotesques, of acute observation and caricaturist spite, of brilliantly arranged tableaux vivants, he might just as well have been trained in a plaster cast studio the moment he took up his brushes and addressed himself to ‘High Art’.
It was a living torture, in fact, to be Benjamin Haydon, to see enemies in every room and suspect every friend, to be so sure of his destiny and so frustrated by the world – ‘tell me,’ one friend would say ‘if Laocoon’s anguish was not an infant’s sleep’ to Haydon’s misery – and yet for all the dogmatic intemperance and towering egotism, he was a man of high thoughts and noble impulses, of generous and chivalrous feelings, of gratitude and reverence and hope and prayer, always in love, always in debt, and not always in the wrong. For most of his life he had been half-mad and for some of it completely so, but in those moments when the clouds of paranoia and hysterical self-assertion parted, he would glimpse truths that others could not see and, like some nineteenth-century garret Galahad – living for weeks at a time only on potatoes so that he ‘would not cloud’ his ‘mind with the fumes of indigestion’ – be vouchsafed visions of the Grail.
He was one of the first and boldest to recognise and trumpet the greatness and artistic truth of the Elgin Marbles, had championed them in the face of derision and dilettante sneers, day after day had gone to the shed in Park Lane where they mouldered forgotten to draw and take casts and learn from them, and there was no sacrifice or hardship he would not suffer to make his own work worthy of their example. In the previous year he had come close to starving and blinding himself whilst painting the Judgement of Solomon, and no disappointment could ever stop him believing that the next canvas, the next vision, the next head he started would, with the grace of God, be the one to scatter his enemies and raise English history painting to its proper place among the nations.
There were periods of deep despair, days when even he could see the gap between the conception and the deed, between what he had glimpsed in his imagination and what his poor hand would perform, but in this first year of Christian triumph over the forces of atheism, of the defeat of Apollyon and the entry of Emperor Alexander into Paris, he had at last found his subject. ‘Designing my Entry into Jerusalem,’ he had written in his journal on 3 February, a month before Bonaparte’s escape – that word my a wholly unconscious but wonderfully Haydon-esque ambiguity – ‘In the left-hand corner I will have a penitent girl, pale, lovely, shrinking, entreating pardon of her Saviour, protected by her mother … who is clasping her in an agony of apprehension, yet with a gleam of hope through her tears … Christ shall have regarded this penitent girl with intense and tender compassion, pointing to Heaven with his hand. I thank God for this conception, and pray him to grant I may execute it with exquisiteness.’
It was a large canvas, not the 400 by 200 feet of his megalomaniac fantasies, but as big as his pocket and his studio would take: fifteen feet by thirteen and showing Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. He would have the figure of Christ on His ass at the centre of the painting, with His right hand raised in benediction, the left arm extended in a gesture of restrained acknowledgement and His head – and somewhere at the back of Haydon’s mind was the pricking knowledge of the trouble he had with heads – framed in a halo of brilliant white light that would cast its glow across the dense crowd parting to greet Him.
A Samaritan woman, spreading out a cloak for the ass to walk upon, would gaze up into the divine face from the bottom right. Beside her another woman would kneel with bowed head. Opposite them, his body curiously twisted, his massive right arm curved to mirror the line of the woman’s cloak, would be his Centurion. Behind them he would paint a sea of faces – Wordsworth, Keats, Hazlitt, Voltaire – poets, critic and sneerer – awed onlookers together at Christ’s and his own triumphal entry into their rightful inheritance. ‘I am full of aspiration and glowing elasticity of imagination … O God Almighty! I bless Thee for this with all my heart,’ he was writing a week later, and with each succeeding day his sense of divine afflatus grew. ‘This week has really been a week of great delight,’ he recorded again at the end of April; ‘Never have I had such irresistible and perpetual urgings of future greatness. I have been like a man with air-balloons under his arm-pits, and ether in his soul. While I was painting, walking, or thinking, beaming flashes of energy followed and impressed me. O God! grant they may not be presumptuous feelings. Grant they may be the fiery anticipation of a great soul born to realise them. They came over me, and shot across, and shook me, till I lifted up my heart, and thanked God.’
Through those early weeks of the Hundred Days he had worked on the Samaritan woman ‘with the passionate self-seclusion of the ascetic, holding intercourse only with my art and my great Creator’. He had, too, taken the opportunity of Wordsworth’s visit to London to take a cast of the great man’s head for his portrait in the crowd. ‘He bore it like a philosopher,’ Haydon recorded in his journal for 13 April; ‘John Scott was to meet him at breakfast, and just as he came in the plaster was put on. Wordsworth was sitting in the other room in my dressing-gown, with his hands folded, sedate, solemn, and still. I stepped in to Scott and told him as a curiosity to take a peep, that he might say the first sight he ever had of so great a poet was in this stage towards immortality.’
Immortality, though, was going to have to wait. He would show that fine head bowed in awe before his Saviour, a moving contrast with the critical ‘investigative’ look he would give to that ‘singular compound of malice, candour, cowardice, genius, purity, vice, democracy and conceit’ that was William Hazlitt. The Centurion too, for the time being, would have to wait. His ‘patron’, Sir George Beaumont, was coming to the studio the next day, and would enjoy watching him working on the sleeve. Beaumont was talking again of buying a picture from him, but that was Beaumont all over. He would make these offers and then pull back. He had done so with his Macbeth. Offer him a mighty work and Lady Beaumont would want something that would fit over her mantelpiece instead. Such, in England, was the fate of the history painter. But
with God’s help, here was the painting that would make the Beaumonts, and the Payne Knights, and the Lawrences and the Northcotes see what they had among them. ‘O God,’ he prayed, ‘let me not know again the horrors of being harassed, not that I fear or shrink from any horror on earth that I must meet in my path, but that I wish to put forth my powers unburthened & unchecked to their full capacity. Thou knowest I have not yet done this, because I have always been obliged to leave things incomplete from necessity. But O God, if it be thy will that I just be further tried in trouble, I submit; grant me only health & confidence in thee. Let me only attain my great object at last. In thee with all my Soul I trust.’
The day was clearing, and his small, airless studio, ‘stinking with the effluvium of paint’ and crammed with his sketches and studies of the marbles, overpoweringly oppressive. If Haydon could not paint he would sit at the feet of genius. He would visit the Wordsworths in their lodgings.
2 p.m.
Ha, Ha
As the recumbent figure of Corporal Sammons lay waiting the finishing touches intended to bring him immortality, the short and violent life of another of Haydon’s models was moving from fact into legend. The fighting for Hougoumont would continue for hours yet, but by two o’clock the point of crisis had shifted from the right to the centre, and it was here, behind and to the west of La Haye Sainte that Corporals Shaw and Dakin and Private Hodgson of Lord Edward Somerset’s Household Brigade, stood waiting the command to charge.