Went the Day Well?

by David Crane

  4 p.m.

  The Finger of Providence

  It is a moot point whether there was a more dangerous place to be this Sunday than among the entourage of the Duke of Wellington. The duke had told one over-enthusiastic artilleryman that commanders-in-chief had better things to do than go firing at each other, but if Bonaparte had reciprocated in kind then the gunners of the Grande Batterie parked on the opposing slope of the valley to the east of the Brussels–Charleroi road had not been listening.

  From the opening shots of the battle the duke had been ‘everywhere to be found’, ‘encouraging, directing, animating … the Genius of the storm, who, borne upon its wings, directed its thunder where to break’. In the days before the campaign opened at Quatre Bras, Bonaparte had run rings around his opponent, but with the start of battle – as Sir Augustus Frazer had confidently predicted – the roles were reversed, and the more remote a memory the Bonaparte of his dazzling victory at Lodi appeared the more decisive and masterly Wellington became.

  No genius of the storm ever cut a more soberly understated figure than Wellington in his boots, white nankeen trousers, white stock, plain blue coat and cocked hat, and it might have been as well if his entourage had followed suit. In the early stages of the battle he had ordered his generals to disperse for safety, but even after the wastage of four hours of fighting, the glittering cavalcade of aides and plumed and beribboned foreign ministers and hangers-on that accompanied him – the whole Troupe dorée, as Lord Uxbridge called them – still provided an irresistible target to any French gunner worth his powder.

  It was all right for Wellington – ‘the finger of Providence’, as he claimed, was most certainly upon him that day – but for those of his staff who stood next to him it was another story. By the end of the day there would be scarcely one of them who had gone unscathed, and at four o’clock they found themselves again in the heat of the battle, close to the lone elm tree, the Waterloo pilgrim’s answer to the ‘true cross’ of the medieval relics market, that stood in the south-west angle of the crossing of the Ohain and the main Brussels roads and marked the duke’s central command position.

  Two crises had been averted, but as Wellington looked through his spyglass at the field spread out below him, things did again, in Captain Mercer’s words, ‘indeed look very bad’. On the slopes beneath La Haye Sainte and over to the left of the road the great cavalry actions that had begun with the charge of the Union and Heavy Brigades had gradually petered out. Around the three pivotal defensive points in front of the allied ridge, though – Papelotte at the eastern extremity of the line, most perilously La Haye Sainte in the centre, and Hougoumont to the right – the fighting was continuing with the same ferocity as ever, draining away allied manpower which Wellington could ill afford. In the no-man’s land between the two armies the French Tirailleurs held sway. In the far distance units of the still unused and massive French reserve – forty-six of Bonaparte’s 103 battalions, including twenty-two of the Imperial Guard – could be seen moving in the direction of the hoped-for Prussian advance. But for Wellington and his staff, as they shuffled their dwindling pack and plugged gaps and watched preparations unfold for the next massed cavalry attack, night was beginning to look a very long way off.

  What happened next seemed in retrospect to have occurred in that suspended time that gives to moments of sudden violence their curious air of slow motion. After the attack of the Scots Greys had temporarily silenced the Grande Batterie, it was again in full voice as a prelude to the first of Marshal Ney’s great cavalry charges. Wellington had his glass to his eye. On horseback at his side was his newly married quartermaster-general and childhood friend Sir William De Lancey. They were talking and as Wellington broke off to dismiss a warning shout from a nearby soldier with a nonchalant ‘never mind’, ‘a ball came bounding along en ricochet … and striking [Sir William] on the back, sent him many yards over the head of his horse. He fell on his face,’ the duke later told Samuel Rogers, ‘and bounded upwards and fell again. All the staff dismounted and ran to him, and when I came up he said, “Pray tell them to leave me and let me die in peace.”’

  The ricocheting ball had struck him a glancing blow on the back near his right shoulder, ripping eight ribs from the spine, piercing the lung with the shattered fragments of bone, but drawing no blood and leaving no visible sign of injury. As the duke knelt at his side, holding his hand, it was clear, though, that there was nothing to be done. ‘The Duke bade him farewell, and endeavoured to draw away the Staff, who oppressed him; they wanted to take leave of him, and wondered at his calmness. He was left, as they imagined, to die.’

  As the sound of the French guns ominously ceased a cousin of De Lancey’s called Barclay ran to his side. Across the valley, a long, rippling line of enemy cavalry, ‘ever advancing … like a stormy wave of the sea when it catches the sunlight’, told why the cannon had fallen quiet. Barclay begged De Lancey to let him move him before they were engulfed in the tide but De Lancey asked only to be left where he was. It was impossible he could live, he told him, and bearers would be more use looking after others. ‘But as he spoke with ease,’ and there was no sign of blood, Barclay ‘took the opinion of a surgeon, who thought he might live, and got some soldiers to carry him in a blanket to a barn at the side of the road, a little to the rear’.

  There the wound was dressed, and Barclay, anxious to rejoin the battle, ordered him to be taken farther back before the barn fell into enemy hands. Before he left, De Lancey drew him closer to him. He wanted to speak of his wife, Magdalene. Only three days earlier they had stood together on their balcony overlooking the Parc as the sound of the fifes faded into the night and now, again, the war seemed to recede from his consciousness as completely as if they were together in her Antwerp room with the windows shut tight against the distant rumble of cannon. ‘Nothing else seemed to occupy his mind. He desired Barclay to write to [her] … to say everything kind, and to endeavour to soften this business, and to break it to [her] as gently as he could. He then said he might move him, as if he fancied it was to be his last effort.’

  They had been married just ten weeks. Just two months ago they had been walking together along the cliffs on her family’s Dunglass estate, where Sir James had rowed James Hutton below the rock formations of Siccar Point and seen the immeasurable vistas of geological time opening up before him. For a few brief days in Brussels, closeted in their apartment, going out only when they knew they could be alone, their minds ruthlessly shut to thoughts of what lay ahead, love had pushed the notion away. But now, alone in the cottage at Mont-Saint-Jean to which De Lancey had been carried, the bleaker lesson of Siccar Point lay starkly before him. Wellington might talk of the hand of God and the finger of Providence, but where in the universe that Herschel’s astronomy and the unimaginable aeons of Hutton’s geology had conjured into being did man fit? What price that ‘bank and shoal of time’ on which he feebly huddled? There would be no easy comforts as De Lancey waited to die, close to the inn where he had reserved a table for that night, in a cottage where no one knew who he was or even that he was alive, with the knowledge that he was leaving behind a young wife in a foreign land. No comfort of any sort.

  5 p.m.

  Portraits, Portraits, Portraits

  On the south side of London’s Strand, midway between the City to the east and the government offices of Whitehall to the west, rose the neo-classical facade of the most ambitious piece of public building of the eighteenth century. There had been a palace of some kind on this site since Tudor times, and for the last twenty years Sir William Chambers’s Somerset House had been at the heart of Britain’s war effort against France, the home of the Navy Board and the administrative and clerical centre for the immense industrial and economic machine that built, maintained and fed Britain’s fleets.

  There was possibly no building in the capital that was simultaneously so un-English in its feel and so ‘British’ in what it said as Somerset House. In the seventeenth century the re
stored and Frenchified Stuart monarchy had harboured building ambitions well above its temporary status in the nation’s life, and when eighteenth-century London finally did build to impress the world and itself with a sense of Britain’s greatness it was not a royal palace it raised but a set of government offices brought together for convenience and efficiency.

  The site was not an easy one to build on, sloping steeply down to the Thames as it did – and the river front, in a miniature parable of the national effort, still remained unfinished – but from the start display had been as important as utility. The pride of place in Chambers’s building belonged to the Navy Board itself, but on the northern, or Strand side, of the great court around which Somerset House was arranged, the premises of the country’s three great cultural institutions – the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Academy – consciously and proudly linked the fruits of peace to the triumphs of war.

  Here was Benjamin Haydon’s vision in stone – Britain as great in the arts as she was in battle – and so it was perhaps appropriate that late on this Sunday afternoon in June an Academician in his late sixties might have been seen walking in under the arch through which twenty years earlier William Pitt had so often ridden on horseback to visit his naval Comptroller of Works. Off the coast of France the Bellerophon and the rest of Hotham’s blockading fleet were a reminder that the work of the Navy Board and the Victualling Board was never done, but for the last two months of the summer, Somerset House had belonged to the Royal Academy and to the tens of thousands of visitors who flocked in off the Strand to pay their 1/- to see its annual exhibition.

  For one reason or another it had been a frustrating sort of day for Joseph Farington – he had been forced to miss church in the morning at St James’s Piccadilly, which he hated doing – but from the moment he turned in under the archway of Somerset House and right into Chambers’s imposing vestibule, he was at home. Farington had never been very much more than a jobbing topographical painter himself, but for more than thirty years now the Academy had been his life, and its cabals and elections, its hanging committees, private shows and dinners, its artistic rivalries, finances, business, intrigues and politics the lifeblood of one of Regency London’s most inexhaustible diarists and fixers.

  He had only been abroad twice – once in 1793 to make topographical drawings of the fortifications at Valenciennes and once at the Treaty of Amiens with Benjamin West, Henry Fuseli and other Academicians – but while younger artists like Haydon and Wilkie could not wait for the peace in 1814 so they could travel, the Lancashire-born Farington was English to the bone. As a young painter he had studied under Richard Wilson, who had made his own name in Italy, but the Thames and the Lakes were about the farthest poles of Farington’s artistic range, modest and old-fashioned watercolours of the river at Eton or Reading about the limit of his ambitions, and the Royal Academy all an elderly widower could now want of life.

  Age and health had limited his active involvement in its committees of late, but this was the final Sunday of the exhibition, and with no one there but the porter, the former Lifeguardsman Samuel Strawger, it was a good chance for one last visit. It was generally agreed in the press that this year’s exhibition was well up to the standard of recent years, and yet in some ways it must have been a bittersweet exercise in nostalgia to be here this Sunday, to see all the portraits and busts commissioned the previous year, to see preserved in paint long after the actuality had faded, all the euphoria and hopes and confidence and pride of the Summer of Sovereigns of 1814, when a whole generation that had never known peace thought that the war with Bonaparte was over for good.

  It was exactly a year to the day – 18 June 1814 – that the City had held a banquet for the Prince Regent, the Emperor of all the Russias and the King of Prussia to celebrate victory, and here still were the heroes of the hour as if everything that they had celebrated was not at that moment under threat. In the inner room visitors could see a design of the Guildhall decorations for that banquet, and stacked high to the ceilings, frame to frame, were reminder after reminder of that year: portraits of the politicians and soldiers – Metternich, Platov, Picton, Vivian, Beresford and Hill – who thought they had done with war; paintings of officers’ favourite chargers that thought they had heard their last trumpet; of naval officers who hoped they had cut out their last prize; of Wellington holding the Sword of State at the Thanksgiving Service for Peace; of Louis ‘le Désiré’ on board a British man o’ war on his way to reclaim his throne; of the celebrations on the Serpentine. And majestically, fraudulently, presiding over them all, resplendent in his military uniform, in the premier position on the east wall opposite the door, Sir Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of the Prince Regent himself. ‘One of the most admirable pictures, either as a likeness or a painting,’ the Morning Post had assured its readers seven weeks earlier, on the eve of the exhibition’s opening, ‘is a portrait of the Prince Regent … The characteristic benevolence of countenance, and that animation that speaks superior mental intelligence and discernment, are inimitably displayed and notwithstanding the numerous excellent portraits which we have seen of this illustrious personage, we can recollect no one which more deserves the title of chef d’oeuvre, than the one in question. The scarlet regimental costume imparts a brilliancy to the general effect of the picture, superior to any other that could have been shown.’

  This was a golden age of British painting within and without the Academy orbit – Turner, Constable, Lawrence, Blake, Cotman, the precocious young Bonington in the wings – but there was no doubt who the star of this exhibition was. Haydon’s influential patron Sir George Beaumont was not at all sure that Lawrence had not gone back rather than progressed since the last show, but he had never been generous about him, and if he was right that there was still that air of ‘tinsel’ about his work, something of trickery in all the painterly surface brilliance that was not quite honest, then was that not exactly the quality that made him the great interpreter of his age?

  Nothing could be more appropriate, in fact, than that the Prince Regent and that supreme royal cosmetician and master of surface appearances, Sir Thomas Lawrence, should hold pride of place, because if a visitor had wanted to see Regency Britain shorn of all disturbing realities, then at the price of a shilling’s entrance and a shilling for the catalogue he could do a lot worse than spend an afternoon at the exhibition. The Academy had decided early in its life to charge an entry fee in order to keep out the wrong sort of person, and if the right sort of person wanted his vanity or patriotism massaged, if he had wanted his own image and that of his countrymen and countrywomen reflected back at him as he would like to see them, then here was the place to be.

  If he wanted to see Britain in all its physical beauty and variety, then here was the landscape, with all the historic associations that had seduced George Ticknor; if he wanted to see the men who had proved Britain’s martial prowess then here were their likenesses; if he wanted to see children in all their romantic innocence untainted by the Reverend Grindrod’s doctrines of sinfulness then here they were romping with their mothers; if he wanted to be reassured of the country’s social stability then here was its gentry with their dogs and horses; and if he wanted his conscience and sense of fellow feeling agreeably stirred then here too could be found what he was looking for. ‘The Distraining for Rent will be the point of attraction for every feeling visitor of the Exhibition,’ the Morning Chronicle told its readers on the eve of the exhibition’s opening. ‘Never before has Mr Wilkie addressed himself so powerfully to the emotions of the breast. No eye can dwell on the picture, without having the sympathies of the soul aroused – so true, so faithful, and so affecting, are all the dramatic personae of this domestic scene. KEAN, with all the aid of language, added to his expressive features and burning passions, never spoke more feelingly home to the heart, than Wilkie has done in this tale of everyday occurrence.’

  If the soul did not waken to the plight of David Wilkie’s famil
y, faced with eviction, then there was Westall’s Drowned Fisherman or William Collins’s The Reluctant Departure to evoke just the right degree of sympathy for the poor. At the private view at the end of April the Tory Sir George Beaumont had complained angrily at the ‘politics’ of Wilkie’s painting, but in the summer of 1815 – a summer when the Duke of Sutherland’s agent, Patrick Sellar, was waiting trial for murder, and the burned and demolished cottages and wrecked lives of the Strathnaver crofters might have showed a bolder child of the manse than the long, thin, cautious David Wilkie what real evictions looked like – the orchestrated emotions and harmonious treatment of Distraining for Rent were not designed to frighten anyone. ‘The colouring of this picture is equal, if not superior,’ to anything he had done before, one critic, enraptured with the particularly fine characterisation of the toothless old crone, insisted, only wishing that the cradle in the foreground, ‘most exquisitely painted in a perspective point of view … had not so new an appearance, in fact that is a fault with some of the other furniture – it is too fine for the family here represented. When we look at the bason and stand in the right-hand corner of the picture, we are induced to say, Mr Wilkie forgets that the furniture of Kensington is not adapted for a rustic cottage.’