Went the Day Well?

by David Crane

  Of all the men who fought at Waterloo, Corporal Jack Shaw’s was the single name that Regency England would certainly have known before the battle started. In the eyes of Benjamin Haydon, Hodgson was the finest specimen of all his models, but it was in the figure of the prize-fighter Jack Shaw – six feet and half an inch in height, 210 pounds in weight, round face, grey eyes, fair complexion – that the brutal, bare-knuckle world of the Game Chicken, Tom Cribb and the freed American slave ‘Blackie’ Molyneux, reached its bloody and logical apotheosis on the field of Waterloo.

  Jack Shaw had been born in 1789 into a respectable farming family near the village of Cossal in Nottinghamshire. As a young boy he had gone to Trowell school before dutifully serving his apprenticeship to a local wheelwright, but for any recruiting corporal at the Nottingham Goose Fair on the look-out for likely victims, a strong and hardened eighteen-year-old with a taste for excitement and the fists of a born fighter like Shaw would have been as easy a goose to pluck as anything that the assizes or prisons could put before him. ‘THE OLD SAUCY SEVENTH … Commanded by that Gallant and Well Known Hero, Lieut. General HENRY LORD PAGET,’ ran one typical recruiting cavalry regiment poster:

  YOUNG Fellows whose hearts beat high to tread the paths of Glory, could not have a better opportunity than now offers. Come forward then and Enrol yourselves in a Regiment that stands unrivalled, and where the kind treatment the Men ever experienced is well known throughout the whole Kingdom.

  Each Young Hero on being approved, will receive the largest Bounty allowed by Government. A few smart Young Lads, will be taken at Sixteen Years of Age, 5 Feet 2 Inches, but they must be active, and well limbed …

  NB. This Regiment is mounted on Blood Horses, and being lately returned from SPAIN, and the Horses Young, the Men will not be allowed to HUNT during the next Season, more than once a week.

  Adventure, the swagger of a uniform, the chance to fight – these were powerful inducements to a boy whose whole life had been lived out against the distant background of war with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Shaw had already made a local name for himself as a boxer before the Goose Fair, and after an early street brawl in Piccadilly with three Londoners who had made the mistake of mocking his uniform, he was taken up by the regiment’s officers and schooled at the Little St Martin’s Lane Fives Court and in the Bond Street rooms where the young Byron sparred and fenced under the tutelage of Gentleman John Jackson and Henry Angelo.

  Here was the louche, accommodating and curiously classless world that provided the model for the young George Keppel’s Westminster; a world shading at one end into a duelling, gaming, whoring demi-monde of money-lenders and pimps and blazing at the other into the full glare of the prize ring. As a nineteen-year-old Henry Angelo had stopped off at the Surgeons’ Hall on his way to Dolly’s Chop House to watch the public dissection of Martha Ray’s murderer, and thirty-six years later his Bond Street rooms and the Newgate gallows remained two sides of the same coin: two of the great London institutions servicing in their different ways that same, insatiable voyeuristic taste for brutality and violence that underlay the surface ‘tinsel’ of Thomas Lawrence’s Regency England.

  It was against this England that Wilberforce had directed all his moral fervour, the England of ‘the Fancy’, gambling and the London underworld, of fair booths, pickpockets and Morocco men; of the mermaids, philosophical pigs, cannibal heads, performing dwarfs and giantesses of Bartholomew Fair, the disappearing, anarchic England of the eighteenth century. ‘Reader have you seen a fight?’ asked Hazlitt, magically conjuring up the esoterica and moral intricacies of a culture in which Englishmen liked to imagine violence and some exclusively English code of honour and fair play eternally sharing the same ring; ‘If not, you have a pleasure to come, at least if it’s a fight like that between the Gas-man [Tom Hickman] and Bill Neate. The crowd was very great when we arrived on the spot; open carriages were coming up, with streamers flying and music playing, and the country people were pouring in over hedge and ditch in all directions to see their hero beat or be beaten.’

  There had been heavy betting on the fight – five-to-four on the ‘Gas’ – but it was the Gas-man’s bragging as to what he was going to do to Neate that had offended Hazlitt’s sense of decorum. ‘Why?’ demanded Hazlitt, should he roll back his sleeve to brandish the right arm he called ‘his grave-digger’? Why ‘should he go up to his antagonist, the first time he ever saw him at the Fives Court, and measuring him from head to foot with a glance of contempt, as Achilles surveyed Hector, say to him, “What, are you Bill Neate? I’ll knock more blood out of that great carcase of thine, this day fortnight, than you ever knock’d out of a bullock’s!” It was not manly, ’twas not fighter like … [and] the less said about it the better. Modesty should become the FANCY as its shadow. The best men were always the best behaved. Jem Belcher, the Game Chicken, (before whom the Gas-man could not have lived) were civil, silent men. So is Cribb, so is Tom Belcher, the most elegant of sparrers and not a man for everyone to take by the nose.’

  This is an evocation of England and Englishness – of plain, manly courage tempered by modesty that, suitably gentrified and Christianised, Rugby School’s Tom Brown would have fitted into happily – and in Lifeguardsman Shaw it had found its prototype. In his first sparring sessions he had seemed little more than a clumsy country lad, but discipline and practice with the sword and dumbbells had given him wrists and shoulders of steel that soon made him more than a match for anyone put in the ring. ‘His height, length, weight and strength,’ the sporting journalist Pierce Egan wrote of him, ‘united with a heart which knew no fear, rendered Shaw a truly formidable antagonist … In a sort of trial set-to at Mr Jackson’s rooms, with Captain Barclay, who, it is urged, never shrunk from punishment … received such a convincing blow on his mouth from the paw of the Life-guardsman … that a dentist was absolutely necessary to replace matters in status quo.’

  The sparring and set-tos at Jackson’s and the Fives Court were ‘friendlies’ fought with gloves, but the transition to bare-knuckles proved no difficulty for Shaw. In these early days he had seen off Molyneux as well as the renowned Barclay, and after savagely disposing of another fighter called Burrows, had returned from the Peninsula to the all-England orbit of Cribb and Oliver with a bout against Ned Painter in front of a crowd of 25,000 on Hounslow Heath.

  The fight lasted just twenty-eight minutes, ended with Painter an insensible and bloodied pulp, and netted Shaw a purse of fifty guineas, but there would be no challenge for the Championship of England. By the time the contest was reported in the Morning Post the first of Wellington’s reinforcements were already on their way to Belgium, and within weeks Shaw, Dakin and the Life Guards had joined them, distinguishing themselves on the withdrawal from Quatre Bras to the ridge of Mont-Saint-Jean by a coolness that not everyone had expected of them.

  There might have been no chance to test himself against Oliver or Cribb, but Waterloo was a battle designed for a prize-fighter of Shaw’s calibre. For an officer like Harry Smith who took a rare and un-amateurish interest in his profession, there was something retrogressive in the brute simplicity of Waterloo, but in a battle so utterly devoid of finesse, variety, tactics or movement – a stand-to ‘milling’ of ‘hard pounding’ in which the only qualities required were courage, strength and endurance – then the Jack Shaws of the army came into their own.

  They were needed, too, because at two o’clock in the afternoon, along the Ohain road to the east of the La Haye Sainte, the battle was being lost. Almost exactly an hour earlier Bonaparte had unleashed the first of the Comte d’Erlon’s divisions on the farmhouse at the centre of the allied line, and when at half-past one a second wave followed it up the slopes to the beat of the pas de charge and the continuous roar of ‘Vive l’Empereur’, the whole allied centre along the sunken road was in danger of being overwhelmed.

  It was at this second great crisis of the battle – with La Haye Sainte surrounded, Picton killed while ral
lying his men, whole battalions decimated, the second line committed, Cuirassiers on the ridge, the Highlanders wavering, the Ohain road to the left in enemy hands – that for the first time Uxbridge’s cavalry were called into action. During the earliest stages of the fighting they had been drawn up in the rear of La Haye Sainte as if they were still back at Knightsbridge, and as the order came to mount, the ‘ball’ that was Waterloo for a moment stood still. From right to left, stretched out on either side of the Brussels road in their finest summer condition, were over two thousand of the most magnificent horses in Europe, nineteen squadrons in all, of more than a hundred sabres each; to the left of the road, Sir William Ponsonby’s Union Brigade made up of the Royal Dragoons, the Scots Greys and the Inniskillings, and to the right of it Lord Edward Somerset’s Household Brigade of the Royal Horse Guards and the 1st and 2nd Life Guards.

  It was for this moment that an eighteen-year-old boy who ‘had heard of battles and … long’d to follow to the field Some warlike lord’, had joined up at the Nottingham Goose Fair eight years before. In London he had laid out three men for objecting to the colour of his coat, and now, in the uniform of the 2nd Life Guards – red jacket, white cross belts, red stripe down grey trousers, and a wonderful confection of a plumed and crested helmet designed by the Prince Regent – Corporal Shaw and a wall of horses half-a-mile long advanced at a walk and then a trot up the reverse slope of the ridge towards the unsuspecting French.

  That brief, illusory moment of stasis was over. Between Uxbridge’s brigades and the 14,000 infantry and supporting cavalry of d’Erlon’s corps were the retreating allied troops, and as they parted to allow their cavalry to pass through, one of the great classics of heroism, triumph, fury, indiscipline and disaster began to unfold. ‘No one but a soldier,’ the infantryman Edmund Wheatley insisted, ‘can describe the thrill one instantly feels’ at the sound of the word ‘Charge’ – and no one but Job could say what that felt like for man and horse. ‘Hast thou given the Horse strength’ – the verses would be inscribed above the grave of William Verner’s Waterloo charger, Constantia – ‘Hast thou clothed his neck with thunder? The quiver rattleth against him, the glittering spear and the shield. He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage: neither believeth he that it is the sound of the trumpet. He saith among the trumpets, Ha, Ha: and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the Captains, and the shouting.’

  It would have been enough to have thrown the most experienced French cavalry, and discipline had never been the British cavalry’s forte. At the left of the line, Corporal Dickson of the Scots Greys ‘felt a strange thrill run through’ him, and as his ‘noble beast’ Rattler ‘sprang forward, neighing and snorting, and leapt’ the holly hedge flanking the Ohain road, any last vestige of control or order disappeared. ‘All of us were greatly excited,’ Dickson recalled, ‘and began crying “Hurrah, Ninety-Second! Scotland for ever!” … for we heard the Highland pipers playing among the smoke … and a moment more were among them … and as we passed through them … many of the Highlanders grasped our stirrups, and in the fiercest excitement dashed with us into the fight.’

  After twenty years without seeing action the Greys were waiting for this day, and as Uxbridge’s brigades hacked and trampled their way through the French attackers and whole battalions fled, surrendered or simply disintegrated in front of them, excitement, ill-discipline, and the impetus of their own charge took them farther and farther down the muddy slopes and upwards again towards the French guns and the waiting French lancers.

  It was a matter only of minutes – less than half the time it had taken to thrash Ned Painter – and even as triumph threatened to turn into disaster, and the exhausted men and horses of Uxbridge’s cavalry found themselves mired in the mud at the foot of the slope at the mercy of the French guns and lancers, Shaw could still be seen cutting and slashing his way to an immortality that poor Haydon could never give him. According to one witness, he had been drinking heavily before the charge, and as the battle dissolved again into a thousand frenzied separate encounters, and Haydon’s ‘Achilles’ split the bald and white-haired head of an elderly officer in two, and the model for his drunken groom, foaming at the mouth, divided the heads of two Cuirassiers, all those years of the dumbbells and sword drill, of the Fives Court milling and the bare-knuckle ring, of a life consecrated to fighting, spilt out in an orgy of violence that no one who saw it forgot.

  No one knows how many men Shaw killed – one downward swing of his arm and a face fell off ‘like a bit of apple’ – and no one could be quite sure how he died. In Gronow’s account he was killed by the sword thrust of a French colonel while fighting at the side of the formidable Captain Kelly, but myth required something more than a single adversary for the Champion Elect of All England. ‘In the melee he found himself isolated, and surrounded by ten of the enemy’s horsemen,’ Captain Knollys would write – numbers taking on an almost symbolic, classical roundness, as explicit and spurious as any 300 Spartans; ‘whirling his good blade swiftly around, he for a time keeps his foes at bay. At length his sword breaks in his hand; but Shaw will not give in, he tears his helmet from his head, and tries to use it as a cestus. The Cuirassiers now close in upon him, and the heroic Guardsman is struck to the earth, and they ride off exulting in the thought that they have at length avenged the hecatomb of Frenchmen who have fallen victim to Shaw’s slaughtering hand.’

  Bleeding from a myriad wounds, the dying Shaw dragged himself towards La Haye Sainte and somehow propped himself against a wall among the beaten enemy. To the left and south of him the shattered remnants of the Scots Greys – led, when his arms had been shot off, by Colonel Hamilton gripping the reins in his mouth – struggled to make their way back to the safety of the ridge and the allied lines. In the hollow Sir William Ponsonby, commander of the Union Brigade, lay dead but the second great crisis of the day was over.

  And ‘Ye who despise the FANCY’, Hazlitt defiantly wrote of the climax of the great Gas-man–Neate fight, when both men were ‘smeared with gore, stunned, senseless, the breath beaten out of their bodies’ and ‘eyes filled with blood’ and ‘noses streamed with blood’ and mouths ‘gaped blood’, and the only thing that kept Bill Neate standing was English courage, ‘Ye, who despise the FANCY, do something to shew as much pluck as this before you assume a superiority which you could have never given a single proof of by any one action in the whole course of your life.’

  It was an odd irony that it should be Hazlitt who provided England with its perfect metaphor – Neate versus the Gas-man; English guts against French arrogance – but if Shaw might have missed his chance against Tom Cribb, he had got his fight. And ‘on that great day of milling’, as Tom Moore put it, ‘when blood lay in lakes, When Kings held the bottle and Europe the stakes’, John Bull and his children had found themselves a new hero.

  3 p.m.

  The Walking Dead

  There can have been nowhere in England where Sundays dawned as reluctantly or bitterly as they did in the condemned cells of London’s Newgate gaol. For twenty-one men and women the nights might at least bring the hope of oblivion, but as the small, pale square of light high in their cell walls slowly gathered strength, and the heavy peal of church bells – five, six, seven and, grimmest of all, eight – tolled away their lives, all the horror that sleep had kept at bay would return. ‘Confused by his dreams, he starts from his uneasy bed in momentary uncertainty,’ one young journalist wrote of those interminable nights and of that moment of recognition when the feverish hopes of dreams gave way to stony reality: ‘It is but momentary. Every object in the narrow cell is too frightfully real to admit of doubt or mistake. He is the condemned felon again … and soon he will be dead.’

  It had already been a long Sunday at the ‘Bottom of the Masters’, where a young servant girl of twenty-two called Eliza Fenning was waiting to know whether she was to hang or be reprieved. By the afternoon of 18 June she had already been in Newgate for more than two months, and her
‘nightmare’, as she thought and spoke of these weeks, had begun even before that, on a Tuesday in March – the Tuesday of Easter Week – in the household of a law-stationer called Robert Turner at 68 Chancery Lane.

  It was appropriate that her ‘public life’ should begin in Chancery Lane, at the heart of London’s legal system set on destroying her, but nothing in her first twenty-two years had ever suggested that it might be where she would end her days. Eliza Fenning – she only used her full name, Elizabeth, in her final letter to her mother – had been born on the island of Dominica in 1793, the daughter of an ‘industrious’ and ‘respectable’ Irish Protestant woman from Cork and of a ‘steady, honest and sober’ Suffolk man who, in twenty years with the 15th of Foot, had risen to the rank of sergeant and the position of Master of the Band.

  There were nine other children born to William Fenning and his wife – all dead by 1815, the last two buried in the churchyard of St George the Martyr in Bloomsbury – but Eliza was made of more robust stuff. In the early years of the nineteenth century, cholera and ‘Yellow Jack’ made the West Indies a notorious graveyard for the European, but while her father’s regiment was ravaged by disease and her brothers and sisters dropped tamely away, the young Eliza thrived on a world of rich and exotic colour, sounds and textures that she would never forget.

  During her Newgate ordeal every minutest biographical detail – the Irish mother, the soldier father, the lushly, proto Bertha-esque suggestiveness of her Caribbean childhood, her London Dissenters’ school, even the rush candle that set fire to her infant cot – would take on a dangerously protean life of its own; but probably nothing counted to her fate quite like her appearance. The only authentic picture that survives of her does not give much away (the first image used on ballad sheets made do with a portrait of the Duke of York’s mistress), but at the age of twenty-two she was clearly a woman of greater charms and intelligence than was good for a servant girl, with a learning, intelligence and fastidiousness that was a credit to her sober Methodist upbringing, and a piquancy and figure – if Robert Cruikshank’s Newgate sketch is any guide – that was anything but.