by David Crane
This Sunday evening it was mainly the great Howard phalanx – Norfolks, Effinghams, Suffolks, Carlisles – that was there to enjoy the turtles killed that morning, but it was the world at the foot of the castle that had brought John Binstead down to Arundel. Sometime during the previous week Binstead had gone up to London, and entering a hosier’s in Cheapside with a man called Reader, bought various articles which he paid for with a £10 note – he had nearly £100-worth of them in tens, fives and ones on him – beautifully executed with the finest camel-hair brushes and ‘purporting to be of the bank of Messrs Ridge & Co’.
There had been a lot of counterfeit notes in circulation this summer – one of the odder by-products of war had been a steep rise in cases of forgery and a corresponding dip in highway robberies – and war had made smugglers, counterfeiters and customs dodgers of some very respectable people. Since 1797 the Bank Restriction Act had banned the issuing of anything except paper notes by the Bank of England, and with the export of gold illegal and every bit of specie, gold and silver, desperately needed for the army and navy and the huge subsidies with which Britain kept her coalition partners fighting, an enterprising sailor with a piece of Spanish lace or an amiable young artist with some fine camel-hair brushes could do very nicely for himself.
From London to Exeter newspapers had been warning shop owners to be on the look-out for forged notes, but it was not easy. ‘Mr. Romanis expressed his unwillingness to change a country note,’ The Times would report a month later, ‘but it appearing that one of the shopmen had some knowledge of Reader, this was considered a sort of guarantee, and the prisoner was accommodated, at the same time affixing a signature (not his own) to the note. On the following day, Mr Romanis presented the note at the house of a respectable banker, in the City, where it was made payable, when it was discovered to be a forgery: search was instantly set on foot for the prisoner, and it was discovered through the medium of Reader, that he had left town for Sussex. A warrant was accordingly procured, and Fogg, the marshalman, sent to execute it. On his arrrival in Chichester, the residence of the prisoner, he learned that he was at Arundel, then the scene of the late fete.’
The lives of Samuel Halliday and John Binstead were converging towards the same cold December morning, and up at the castle, medieval fantasy and noblesse oblige were coming together for one last chivalric hurrah. The newspapers had been keen to reassure readers that it was a particularly exclusive party that the Duke of Norfolk was entertaining this Sunday, but the one Howard who was not there to talk jousts and costumes with the Effinghams and the rest of them was Major the Honourable Frederick Howard of the 10th Hussars – the younger son of Lord and Lady Carlisle, and the best of the Howards, as Byron saluted him.
As they lingered over their dinner in Arundel Castle, and a dazed Edmund Wheatley turned his back on the battlefield and trudged towards Genappe, Frederick Howard and the light cavalry of Sir Hussey Vivian’s 6th Brigade were moving from left to right to form up in support of the Brunswickers on the plateau above and to the west of La Haye Sainte.
It seems wonderfully fitting that at the last great climax of the battle, the advance of Bonaparte’s legendary Imperial Guard, they could see almost nothing for the smoke that had turned a June summer’s evening into a ‘London November fog’. On the left of their squadrons they could make out the pitiful remnants of Ponsonby’s and Somerset’s brigades, but save for the deafening noise of battle there was nothing to tell them that fifty yards to their front the whole allied line, from Hougoumont on the right to La Haye Sainte and the Brussels road, was under attack.
The exhausted allied infantry had been waiting for this moment – knew it was only a matter of time – but there was still no mistaking the frisson of excitement at the sight of the dark, advancing mass as the Imperial Guard emerged in two dense formations out of the smoke that filled the valley. Throughout the day and ever after, men would think and talk of the battle in the language of the ‘ring’, and here, at the climax of the fighting, at the end of eight hours ‘hard pounding’ and ‘milling’ – the end of a day in which the two ‘greatest captains of the age’ and the ‘two Greatest Nations in the world’ slugged it out to a standstill – it seemed almost as if history owed it to Waterloo to cede the last decisive action to the elites of both armies. ‘The sanguinary drama was now, with the long and trying day, fast drawing to a close,’ wrote Edward Cotton of the 7th Hussars. ‘The Imperial Guards, their country’s pride, they who had never turned their backs on foe or fled the battlefield, were now, for the first time, about to attack men who, like themselves, acknowledged no victor; the unconquered were to measure their prowess with men who had never been vanquished, the world waiting with anxious expectation the result of this memorable day.’
At the far end of the battlefield, in and around the village of Plancenoit to the rear and right of the French lines, some of the most vicious fighting of the day was going on against Bülow’s advancing Prussians, but it was still on the ridge at Mont-Saint-Jean that the battle was to be lost and won. Bonaparte had from the start gambled on the fact that he could hold off a Prussian attack for long enough to rout Wellington, and now with his own reserves running out and envelopment of his right flank only a matter of time, here was his last chance.
With Ney at their head and the drummers beating out their incessant rhythms, the Imperial Guard came up the slope in two diverging masses, one smashing into the faltering Nassauers and Brunswickers near La Haye Sainte, and the other angling farther towards the allied right. The Guard had been kept under wraps by Bonaparte throughout the battle and were still fresh troops, while hidden behind the bank of the covered lane in front of them, lying down in ranks four deep and a thousand yards along, was an army – all British in the front line for this final assault – that had been under incessant attack from artillery, cavalry, infantry and mental and physical exhaustion for eight bruising hours.
‘Hard pounding, this, gentlemen, try who can pound the longest,’ Wellington had roused his officers, and as the British guns along the ridge opened up with canister on the first, packed ranks of the columns, a thousand Guards under Maitland rose to their feet and poured in a lethal volley at no more than fifty-yard range. As the French faltered under a hail of fire and the cry – ‘Now, Maitland, now’s your time!’ – entered into British mythology, an infantry that had been on the defence all day went in with the bayonet. To their right, in the ground between Hougoumont and Maitland’s Guards, the light infantry of Colborne’s 52nd unleashed a tremendous fire on the exposed flanks of the advancing French. To the left the situation around La Haye Sainte was stabilised and then reversed, and suddenly – with that unexpected, startling suddenness of a snapping bow string – a check had turned into a retreat, retreat into flight and a French army that had fought with such unremitting bravery all day was disintegrating into a panicking rabble.
Along the whole length of the line, from Hougoumont to La Haye Sainte, a long rolling cheer, taken up in turn by each unit as Wellington rode past urging them on to a general advance, spread the word that men who had had nothing to do but endure thought they would never hear. On the left side of the Brussels road near where the Inniskillings of the 27th lay Captain Kinkaid had begun to think that this would be the first battle in which every man on both sides was killed, and now – out of nowhere it seemed – as the physical and metaphorical fog of war cleared enough to reveal the valley below them, a whole enemy army could be seen in flight and the Prussians advancing from the east.
Blücher had been as good as his word. At the far left of the allied line, where Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar’s Nassauers had fought so bravely all day, Papelotte was in Prussian hands. To the right rear of the French position, the flames and smoke belching out of Plancenoit’s church and houses marked where the savage hand-to-hand fighting for the village was coming to its murderous end. And on the crest of the Mont-Saint-Jean ridge, Sir Hussey Vivian’s and his cavalry’s moment had come. At a smart canter a
nd then a gallop Major the Hon. Frederick Howard and the 10th Hussars poured down the slope and fell upon a force of milling Chasseurs. In every account of these last moments of Waterloo a different witness places the engagement at a different spot on the battlefield, but whether it was on the right of the Brussels road or on the left, far in advance of the Guards or behind, whether the impossible Sir John Vandeleur refused his support or a Hanoverian infantry battalion refused theirs – every detail would be angrily thrashed out for decades to come – one incontestable fact is left. Having scattered the French Chasseurs, Vivian galloped up to Howard and ordered him to charge a column of the Guard retreating towards La Belle Alliance. In the dying moments of the battle, with victory already won, the eternal pattern of the day – French cavalry against British square – was about to be reversed. Not, though, the inevitable outcome. A fellow officer of the 10th, Lieutenant Arnold, made one last appeal to a Hanoverian officer to deploy their muskets against what was now a solid square ‘but he still refused, saying that he did not care for General Vivian, that he was not his general’. With that, Howard charged. Close beside him, in front of the squadron, rode Arnold and Lieutenant Anthony Bacon. The French – self-preservation or the old disciplines asserting themselves at the last – reserved their fire until they were almost on them and then ‘the havoc was frightful’. All three officers were hit in almost the same instant. ‘Their praise is hymn’d by loftier harps than mine,’ wrote Byron,
Yet one I would select from that proud throng,
Partly because they blend me with his line,
And partly that I did his sire some wrong,
And partly that bright names will hallow song;
And his was of the bravest, and when shower’d
The death-bolts deadliest the thin files along,
Even where the thickest of war’s tempest lower’d,
They reach’d no nobler breast than thine, young gallant Howard!
Noblesse oblige had claimed its last victim of the day. The Percys, the Wyndhams, the Howards – all guests at Arundel this weekend – had paid their dues. As the last light of a summer’s evening, filtered through the duke’s stained-glass homage to the Howard dynasty, fell on old Lord Carlisle, the ‘best of the Howards’ lay dead. The tourney was over.
8 p.m.
A Mild Contusion
In the city of Brussels, it had been a long, frightening thirty-six hours since Charlotte Waldie and her brother and sister had managed to make their escape the previous morning. Over the last three days the town had learned to live with the sound of cannon, and the distant rumble of guns that had once brought them to the walls in panic now seemed almost a comfort compared with the constant, moment-to-moment fluctuations of fear and hope.
It is unlikely that many had the time or leisure to give it a thought, but if any of the town’s émigré Britons had paused to think as they watched the city’s locals sitting at their café tables on the Charleroi road, ‘drinking beer and smoking and making merry, as if races or other sports were going on, instead of the great pitched battle which was then fighting’, they might have sent up a Sunday prayer of thanks for the Channel and a navy that through two decades of war had given them the luxury of looking down on foreigners. For the last two days the Antwerp road had been clogged with refugees fleeing the advancing French army, and as rumour had followed rumour through the day (the duke’s flank had been turned … the allies were in flight … the French were in town … the scum of Blücher’s beaten army were pillaging the countryside …) the dwindling rump of that expatriate world that only on Thursday night had danced at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball were desperately searching for a barge or carriage or cart that could get them out of the city.
The first wounded had begun to arrive late in the afternoon, increasing again the anxiety of the city, and even when the only French who appeared in Brussels were prisoners of war, the news that trickled back with the injured was almost universally dire. There was talk again that the Prussians had never come to Wellington’s aid, and as Fanny D’Arblay (Fanny Burney) lay in her clothes and boots ready to flee, and the Whig MP, Thomas Creevey’s ‘young ladies’ lay dressed on their beds, and the injured continued to pour in to the town, the Reverend G. G. Stonestreet, Chaplain of the Guards – who had begun the day cashing a bond for £30 and honourably ended it, to his rather pleased surprise, with ‘a mild contusion’ – settled in to what would be a long night’s work.
There were letters to write for wounded officers, and if the men would have to fend for themselves they would probably not have been much troubled by that. Forty years later Sir George Seymour would piously postpone the slaughter of a Chinese navy armed with stink bombs and fireworks from the Sabbath to the Monday, but from Towton to Toulouse – with a brief pause for the God-driven men of Cromwell’s armies – the English soldier had been an essentially Godless creature, as happy to do his killing or be killed on a Palm or Easter Sunday as any other day of the week.
It had shocked Stonestreet to find out how casually men could face death, with what levity they could meet their Maker, and yet it had shocked him in the same way as the waltz or a low-cut dress might do. A few weeks before he had joined the rest of Brussels’ English community in the Grande Place for the guillotining of three murderers, and one in particular had stuck in his mind, a man who had been kept two years in solitary confinement to prepare him for this moment and had come into the square in the tumbrel laughing and dancing and mocking the priest at his side, before mounting the scaffold with a sang-froid that shocked to the core an Englishman brought up on social proprieties and the exemplary value of capital punishment.
It was probably just as well that he could not have seen what was already happening across the battlefield, the callous brutalities of soldiers and peasants, stripping the dead and dying of all they had, but George Stonestreet had already come a long way in the year since he had fallen in with an old college friend from their Cambridge days. In the way that clergymen did, the two men had soon got on to the subject of money and clerical preferment, and as his friend had just come into a legacy and had no further need of his army chaplain’s salary, he had suggested to Stonestreet that he might like to fill his place.
The position might not have been what he wanted, but if England was the best place in the world to live for those who had money, as Stonestreet ruefully told his stockbroker brother-in-law George Trower, it was different for an impoverished clergyman, and with the war clearly coming to an end there might be worse things than a posting abroad and a chance to save for the future. He did not hold out much hope of ‘advancing the cause of religion’ among the Newgate fodder who would make up his new flock, but George Griffin Stonestreet was not a man to let idle scruples get in the way of sound finance and, with his ‘motives sincere’, as he assured himself, and ‘the co-operation of that Great Power in whose cause I was going forth’ confidently expected, the finger of Providence as well as of Prudence was clearly pointing him in the direction of the Low Countries.
Money was in the blood of George Stonestreet if not in his pocket – his father, George Griffin (he had only assumed the name of Stonestreet in 1794) had been a founder of the Phoenix fire insurance company – and neither Jesus College, Cambridge, nor ten years as an indigent curate had made the son shake off the dust of the City. There were doubts in the family as to whether he had done the right thing in joining the chaplains’ department, but he had played his cards cannily, extracting from the Bishop of Exeter a blank form that he could fill in at his own leisure, guaranteeing him the return of a ‘small piece of preferment’ he had held at Honeychurch in west Devon if things did not work out with the army.
Nothing could have seemed more propitious than the day little more than a year ago when he left London for Harwich and the packet for Ostend, a day when the whole city was celebrating the fall of Paris and the imminent end of hostilities. ‘The streets were noisy with horns,’ he remembered – it must already have seemed a l
ifetime away as he sat beside makeshift Brussels beds – ‘& the joyful news resounded that the guilty Paris had fallen before the arms of the Allies … It was almost painful to me to be obliged to quit London in a moment of public exultation. From a boy, I had been taught to take no ordinary share of feeling in public events, & when I stepped into the Harwich Mail, the streets were illuminated & thronged with people, the sound of fireworks & of cannon were heard all around & it seemed to me almost an act of ingratitude to quit the Metropolis on this festival night.’
It was one of those glorious ‘Night of Nights’ that the young De Quincey rejoiced in, with the night ride on a Victory Mail to make it all the sweeter, and as the coach lumbered eastwards, carrying the news that ‘Paris est Pris through Whitechapel, Mile End, Bow and across the River Lea into Essex’ there was only a small cloud to darken Stonestreet’s horizon. He had been advised by his City connections to take gold with him to Brussels as English banknotes were at such a wretched rate of exchange on the continent. ‘But how,’ as he asked himself, ‘was this to be done? Not a guinea had been seen in England for years, except now & then as a counter at a whist table; and even if I had them, how were they to escape the vigilance of the Custom House Officers, who had particular instructions to search for & seize all bullion attempted to be exported?’
Twenty years of war had not just made counterfeiters of young Chichester artists like poor John Binstead, but lawbreakers of the great and the good, and in the days before he sailed, Stonestreet had managed to cobble together seventy gold sovereigns from friends in London. On the way down to Harwich he had carefully hidden these about his eminently respectable clerical person, and the next day he had just stopped congratulating himself on successfully evading the customs officers’ attentions, when a sweeping bow aboard the Ostend packet to his new commanding officer sent the sovereigns in his hat lining flying across the general’s cabin floor.