Went the Day Well?

by David Crane

The British would be still holding Hougoumont and still fighting there now if it were necessary – the carnage around buildings and orchard would show just how many lives it cost the French – but at the centre of the lines the beleaguered and isolated garrison of La Haye Sainte had been holding on by a thread all afternoon. Within the burning and devastated farm buildings the men were down to their last rounds of ammunition, and at some time shortly after six – and after repeated desperate calls for assistance had gone unanswered – it finally fell as the French swarmed in over its walls and its last forty-three surviving defenders fought their way out in a final, savage frenzy of slaughter.

  It had taken them almost seven hours, but the French had at last got what they needed, and with La Haye Sainte and its walls and vantage points now in their hands, Wellington’s position was more perilous by the moment. From the start of the battle La Haye Sainte had been receiving the full attention of the Grande Batterie, and now that the farm was in French control, with their sharpshooters on its roofs sweeping the exposed allied centre with their fire and their Tirailleurs swarming over the hollow, its guns could be brought up to support the final breakthrough that had been threatening since Uxbridge’s charge had earlier thwarted it.

  It was at this moment in the battle that, rather like the tableau vivant that memories made of De Lancey’s wounding, the wider action seemed to pause to give a single incident an almost symbolic significance in people’s recollections. For the last few hours Edmund Wheatley had been standing in square with his KGL troops behind and above La Haye Sainte, and as the French pressed forward an order came for the battalion to deploy into line and advance. There were French cavalry in support of their infantry and, as everyone in the battalion knew, it was a command that could only end in tragedy. Earlier in the day the Prince of Orange – ‘screaming like a newborn infant, “Form into line!, Form into line!”’ – had very nearly wiped them out and their luck was not going to hold a second time. ‘Would it not be advisable to advance in square, and not form line till close to the enemy’s infantry?’ the KGL’s Colonel Ompteda asked.

  ‘God damn it!’ an ADC shouted back. ‘My order is to order you to deploy immediately.’ As General Alten came up, Ompteda repeated his worry: would it not, at least, be wise to advance with cavalry cover? he asked, pointing to the French Cuirassiers.

  Just then the Prince of Orange galloped up, and ‘Silly Billy’ was not a man to learn by his mistakes. ‘I must still repeat my order to attack in line with the bayonet,’ he insisted, ‘and I will listen to no further arguments.’

  ‘Then I will,’ Ompteda replied and mounted his horse.

  Quietly asking his battalion commander von Lisingen ‘to save his two nephews’, Ompteda ordered his men into line ‘with a strong injunction to walk forward’ until he gave the word. ‘I saw that the French had their muskets pointed at the Colonel,’ another officer in the battalion recalled, ‘but they did not fire’, the officers striking up the men’s barrels with their swords, ‘astonished at the extraordinarily calm approach of the solitary horseman whose white plume showed him an officer of the highest rank’. When they had got within sixty yards, Ompteda gave the order to charge, and as the bugle sounded and they surged forward huzzaing, the last words Wheatley heard from Ompteda as he ran past him were: ‘That’s right Wheatley.’

  ‘No one but a soldier can describe the thrill one instantly feels in such an awful moment,’ wrote the young lieutenant; ‘I found myself in contact with a French officer but ere we could decide, he fell by an unknown hand. I then ran at a drummer, but he leaped over a ditch through a hedge in which he stuck fast. I heard a cry of, “The Cavalry! The Cavalry!” But so eager was I that I did not mind it at the moment, and when on the eve of dragging the Frenchman back (his iron-bound hat having saved him from a cut) I recollect no more. On recovering my senses, I look’d up and found myself, bareheaded, in a clay ditch with a violent head-ache. Close by me lay Colonel Ompteda on his back, his head stretched back with his mouth open, and a hole in his throat.’

  Across Wheatley’s leg, pinning him down, was a French arm, and for a moment he was too confused to realise where he was. Lifting himself up a little, he looked over the rim of the ditch and found he was behind the enemy’s positions, and playing dead, held his breath until a tug at his epaulettes and a ‘Voici un autre b’ signalled the end of his battle. ‘A thought struck me – he would turn me round to rifle my pockets. So starting up, I leaped up the ditch; but a swimming seized me and I was half on the ground when the fellow thrust his hand in my collar, grinning, “Ou va’s tu, chien?” I begged of him to let me pick up my cap and he dragged me into the house.’

  It may have been the end of Wheatley’s battle, but it was not the end of his day. Inside the ruins of La Haye Sainte nothing remained but the rafters and props, and flung together on the brick floor the bodies of Baring’s German infantry and French Tirailleurs. As he was dragged down through the French lines to the rear – captor and captive crouching together in a ditch by the main chaussée to escape the answering cannonade of the allied guns – Wheatley looked over the edge and back up the ridge above La Haye Sainte to where he had fought. ‘I could see our Cavalry behaving gallantly,’ he recalled, ‘and felt a national pride at sight of our little squares, enveloped in a light mist, surrounded by innumerable Foes. The ground on which I had stood since the morning was bare and I felt a chill on supposing the whole of my Comrades had sunk under the French sword.’

  They had. Ompteda had been right. The French cavalry had fallen on their flank and rear, slaughtering them. ‘Allons! Marche!’ a guard jabbed him in the arm, pushing him along the road south through the French lines towards Genappe. Behind Wheatley the battle was entering its last, brutal phase. As they tramped back through the human wreckage of war – the ditches beside the road crammed with corpses and filled with the groans of the wounded and the dying – Bonaparte was playing his last card. Smoke covered the battlefield, but from Hougoumont on their left to La Haye Sainte on the right the sounds of drums and the roar of voices filled the air. The Imperial Guard – still fresh – were marching towards the shattered units of Wellington’s exhausted army.

  7 p.m.

  Noblesse Oblige

  Colonel Thomas Nicholl was old-fashioned enough to have long since finished his dinner. Down in town smarter men might be edging the time of the meal back, but a retired colonel and a JP with slaves in the West Indies and a fine old, seven-bay pile, topped with shaped gables, near Hendon called Copt Hall, probably felt secure enough of his place in the world to hold on to his own ways.

  He would not have been a soldier, though, if his thoughts had not been elsewhere this Sunday because on the other side of the Channel he might have seen the story of a great part of his life mapped out along the ridge of Mont-Saint-Jean. Nicholl had been commissioned into the 33rd of Foot – Wellington’s own regiment – in 1772, and had sailed as an ensign to America on the outbreak of the War of Independence, serving with the 33rd from the First Siege of Charleston in 1776 right through to Guilford Court House in 1781, before transferring as lieutenant and captain into the 70th in the May of that year.

  The 33rd had already had a bad time of it at Quatre Bras but it was for the soldiers of the 44th that he would have been most anxious. Nicholl had been unfortunate in his time with the 70th if it was fighting he wanted, and after serving in that historic graveyard of the British Army, the West Indies, had done nothing more exciting than garrison duties in Gibraltar and Jersey, steadily rising by purchase during one of the most dismal periods in the history of the army, before transferring to the command of the newly formed 2nd Battalion of the 44th in 1803.

  The 2nd Battalion of the regiment – the East Essex – had been raised in Ireland after the collapse of the Treaty of Amiens and if regimental form was anything to go by, colonel and men might well have been relieved to find themselves on garrison duties. During the course of the previous sixty years the 44th had established its claim to be
the most disaster-prone unit in the army, but under Nicholl’s brief command the regiment that had been decimated at Prestonpans by Highlanders, slaughtered at Monongamela by Indians, and turkey-shot by backwoodsmen at New Orleans two weeks after the peace treaty with the United States had been signed, had, perhaps mercifully, got no farther than routine duties on English soil.

  The worst was still to come – the regiment would be wiped out to a man on the disastrous retreat from Kabul – but if ever a regimental tradition offered a testimony to the enduring spirit of the British soldier in the face of his generals it is that of the 44th. In the hundred-and-thirty-odd years of its history it found itself under the command of some of the most unfortunate leaders ever to send troops into battle, and yet time and again the men and junior officers who had been mauled in one campaign would be there to take their chance in the next, the survivors from Scotland turn up to die under General Braddock in America, the men fighting under Lord Raglan who had slogged up the slopes of Alma reappear to win Inkerman, the battalion who had been beaten at Bergen-op-Zoom in the last disastrous operation of 1814 under Sir Thomas Graham come back under Wellington at Quatre Bras and Waterloo to fight as if they had never known what defeat was.

  It seems curiously symbolic that at just about the time that the 2nd Battalion of the 44th, who had already suffered 160 casualties, rose for the final general advance of the day, their first colonel was himself rising from his dinner table at Copt Hall. At the end of the meal Nicholl’s footman, Robert Gale, had placed all the plate in a wicker basket and given it to a groom to take to the scullery, before later putting it in the pantry himself for cleaning and going off for his own dinner.

  During their time in America the 33rd had earned themselves a reputation for the efficiency with which they carried out their sentry duties, but standards had clearly slipped at Hendon, and that was the last time that Robert Gale, Thomas Nicholl, or anyone else at Copt Hall would see the colonel’s plate. The house was set in its own park providing a good covering of trees, and sometime just after seven, Samuel Halliday, a former servant at the hall who had either been dismissed or let go the previous November, slipped through the gardens, found the back door unlocked, made his way into the pantry and stole the basket and the silver while Robert Gale was still sitting over his dinner.

  It seems highly unlikely that this was Halliday’s first offence – it was certainly not his last – and yet if he was an old hand in the business he was clearly not a natural. It was no more difficult to slip out of Copt Hall unseen than it was to get in, but having dumped the basket in a nearby ditch, he bundled up the silver in a blue cloth, and set off on the ten-mile walk to the one haunt in Britain that was an even riskier place for Colonel Nicholl’s silver than the Copt Hall pantry, and that was Newgate gaol.

  There is only one way into this world, as poor, sleepless, half-hinged Sam Whitbread’s doctor urbanely told the Whig politician, Henry Brougham, but many ways out of it, and Samuel Halliday had unwittingly already chosen his own sad route. At any time over the last twenty years Halliday would have provided the perfect fodder for Wellington’s army, but the irony of his lot was to begin his bungling, tragi-comic spiral into crime at that precise moment when the one viable alternative to the gallows, hulks and transport ships was about to dry up.

  The only surprise is that anyone so utterly inept ever got as far as Newgate – the previous week Byron’s publisher, John Murray, had been attacked and robbed in these same fields to the north of London – but at some hour that night Halliday found himself and his haul of twenty-seven silver forks, seventeen silver tablespoons, three silver dessert spoons, one silver soup ladle, one silver gravy spoon, two silver butter ladles, two silver teaspoons, one silver fish-slice and one silver salad fork, safely locked up within the walls of London’s most notorious crime and distribution centre. ‘I was in Newgate as a prisoner, in June last,’ one patriotically named inmate-turned-snitch called England Blower was ready to testify, ‘and I remember [Halliday] coming to Newgate … he brought a blue bundle under his left arm; he gave it to the wardsman, named Galler. I did not then see what it contained; but they put it under a bed; and soon afterwards a prisoner of the name of James Hankey, was sent for.’

  It is impossible to know the exact arrangement, but what followed would seem to have been a perfect stitch-up, a harmonious collaboration of authority and inmate, with the hapless Halliday caught in the middle. He had been assured by the wardsman-fence that he could dispose of any plate he would bring in, and with James Hankey, a convicted thief with a speciality in coppers awaiting transportation to Australia, always ready to offer his expert services, the hapless Halliday never had a chance. Along ‘with two or three others’ Hankey retired ‘to the necessary’ to inspect the bundle, while Galler and Halliday sat down together over a beer to discuss terms. He had never ‘seen such things before’, England Blower remarked of the ‘great quantity of spoons, and forks, and a slice’ that had been unwrapped in the ‘necessary’, and Samuel Halliday would never see them again. When he and Galler had finished their beer, they went back to the bed to recover the silver.

  ‘My God, it is gone,’ Galler said.

  It would probably have surprised the twenty-two-year-old John Binstead if anyone had told him this Sunday that Samuel Halliday would come to be his closest friend, but as he mingled among the crowds in Arundel, fate in the person of Fogg the marshalman was already bringing them together.

  It was the 600th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta, and up in the castle, the Duke of Norfolk was entertaining the extended Howard clan. For the last fortnight the papers had been carrying reports of the medieval tournament that he was planning, and for a popular and enterprising young artist like Binstead from just along the coast at Chichester, the great crowds that Arundel was expecting must have seemed the perfect opportunity to show his work.

  The tourney proper – the medieval jousting – had not yet started but the first guests had been there since the great opening banquet on Thursday. ‘Yesterday’ – 15 June – ‘being appointed the day for the commencement of the grand Baronial Festivities, the Morning Post regaled its readers, ‘every arrangement that could give celerity to its completion was facilitated, and finally accomplished with great splendour. It is the intention of his Grace to continue the festivities for twenty-one days. On every Thursday during that period there is to be a Ball, and every week is to be succeeded by fresh visitors. The castle will be opened three days during that period for every person who shall equip himself in a respectable manner, and Monday is talked of as the first day.’

  The dinner that Thursday had been served up at five thirty by ‘Mr. Waud of Bond-street, in a style of great magnificence’, and at six o’clock – just as they were thinking in Brussels about dressing for the Duchess of Richmond’s ball – the immense figure of His Grace the Duke of Norfolk, decked out in the uniform of the Sussex Militia, with the Marchioness of Stafford on his arm, entered the hall to the strains of ‘O, the Roast Beef of Old England’. Throughout the dinner the Sussex band had continued to play national airs, and after the cloth was removed, and the duke had proposed the toast to the ‘Fair of this Company’ and to ‘The Duke of Wellington’, and the band had given ‘See! The conquering Hero’, he reminded his guests – Howards and Wyndhams and Percys and Grenvilles, seventy-five in all – why they were there. ‘While the glorious achievements of this great General beamed upon the mind in glorious resplendence of action,’ he told them, ‘we must not forget from whence the laws under which he had fought and conquered proceeded. He had invited the distinguished party … before him for the purpose of commemorating an event which ought to be reverenced as the foundation of the rights and privileges of the people – he alluded to those illustrious characters, the ancient Barons of England, who compelled King John to sign an instrument which secured to all ranks an equal administration of justice. He hoped the commemoration of such an event would be carried down the stream of posterity, and ever
be impress’d on all minds of all ages with respect and adoration.’

  In the England of Liverpool, Sidmouth and Ellenborough – an England that was about to fight to restore a Bourbon on the throne – statues of ‘Alfred dictating the right of Jury’ or ‘Liberty supported on the Howard Arms’ were pointed stuff, but whatever else was in the air at Arundel this week it was not radicalism. As a younger man the Duke of Norfolk had famously given the toast at a Crown and Anchor Tavern dinner of ‘Our sovereign’s health – the majesty of the people’, but good Whig and Protestant that he still was, this was above all a display of conspicuous consumption in the grand style, a spectacular, family commemoration in stone, glass, music, paint, joust and costume of the Howards and their long role in English history. ‘A noble Gothic hall has been built expressly for the occasion,’ the Exeter Flying Post told its readers, ‘80 feet long by 35, and the height is 30 feet. Mr. Backler has finished a most exquisite work for its Gothic window, emblazoned with heraldic ornaments. The immense range of rooms, all after the purest specimens of the florid Gothic, will be lighted up in the most brilliant style. All the knights will appear in full costume of the Order for those days, there will be tournaments given in the ancient style, succeeded by balls for the ladies.’

  ‘To give full effect to the spectacle, every record has been searched, to discover the costume of ancient times in all its bearing,’ Jackson’s Oxford Journal took up the theme, and although the Barons’ room was not yet finished, the Caledonian Mercury reassured its readers, it had been hung in scarlet and ‘the floor matted so as to form a magnificent, as well as comfortable dining room; On the window at the extremity of the room, facing the Court yard, is a superb painting, representing King John, sitting, attended by the Pope’s Nuncio, and the Barons, while the King’s page, Sir Hugh Montgomery, presents the Duke of Norfolk of that day to the King. The likeness represented is a strong one of the present Duke.’