Went the Day Well?

by David Crane

  The ghost – he would make regular appearances in political cartoons satirising the Cumberland marriage debate – was that of a man called Joseph Sellis, whose body lay buried under the road just outside the door to the egg factory near Scotland Yard. Five years earlier, on 31 May 1810, Cumberland had been woken at two in the morning in his St James’s apartment by a succession of violent blows, and staggering from his bed, bleeding from sword wounds to his face, throat, arms and hand, glimpsed in the shadows the figure of his attacker fleeing the chamber in the direction of the closet of his Italian valet, Joseph Sellis.

  There were a lamp and taper burning by his bed, and in the pools of light he could see the side table and a letter covered with blood and a naked sabre lying on the floor, but it was only when his cries of murder brought his valet Christopher Neale that it was noticed that the door between the duke’s bedchamber and Sellis’s was locked. The duke’s cries for help had by now woken most of the household, and while Guardsmen searched the palace for intruders, Mrs Neale, with the head porter in tow, went round by a second door to Sellis’s room.

  From inside came the sound of gurgling. Sellis had, it appeared, cut his throat from ear to ear – he was half-dressed and lying on the bed in a pool of blood when they went in – and the next day a hastily convened jury heard evidence from the duke and his servants and brought in the inevitable verdict of suicide. In the early hours of 2 June, Sellis’s body was taken down to a spot near the Thames and buried under the highway in the best approved style, but if the authorities imagined that they were going to bury the doubts and questions with him – or that daily bulletins of the state of the duke’s wounds, or throwing open the bedchamber, complete with the bloodied satin sheets to the public was going to win him any sympathy – then they were soon disabused.

  There had been odd inconsistencies in the evidence from the start that disturbed even the royal household – Sellis was left-handed, the wound to his throat inflicted by a right hand; he had clearly not killed himself where he lay – and then there was the question of Sellis’s motive. It did not seem from the evidence that he had harboured any particular grievance against Cumberland, and when the prime witness, Christopher Neale, was rapidly pensioned off and sent to Ireland, even the most loyal of Tories must have found the claim that Sellis had done it because he was a Catholic or because he had had his travelling allowance reassessed the year before worryingly thin.

  With doubts like this circulating even at Windsor, and the Neales vanished, it did not take the opposition press long to come up with another version of what had happened. In some pamphlets it was claimed that the duke had been having an affair with Sellis’s wife, but the story that gained most credence, and would wash in and out of the courts for the next twenty-odd years, was that Cumberland and the page Neale had been involved in a homosexual affair; that Sellis had caught them in flagrante, had tried to blackmail the duke who had murdered him or had him murdered, faked his suicide, faked his own wounds, packed the coroner’s jury with the help of the ubiquitous Lord Ellenborough, and paid Neale and his family to leave the country.

  It says volumes for Cumberland’s reputation that this could be widely believed – even the fact that the foreman of the jury was the political activist Francis Place was countered with accusations that Place was a government spy – and five years later the ghost of Sellis still hovered between the duke and his hopes of a new marriage settlement. He knew he could rely on the Prince Regent to overrule or ignore Queen Charlotte’s objections to his new wife, and Liverpool’s government too could be depended on; but Parliament? – the same Parliament that was baying for the head of Sir Henry Mildmay; the same Commons in which William Wilberforce was as concerned with the morals of a royal duke as he was of a countess; the same Commons in which the radical scourge of Tory corruption, Thomas Cochrane, would soon be out of prison and free to speak and vote? Parliament was another matter.

  As the Duke of Cumberland walked through the guard in St James’s Palace, where the young Ensign Gronow was supposed to be on duty, the day of Waterloo was drawing to its close. Across the park, a light would still be burning where Caroline Lamb was plotting her own alter ego and society’s death in a last, fictional orgy of violence and revenge, but in the darkness of the park and across Britain the world could go on in its old course for another day. In Horse Guards and at the Navy Office in the Strand the candles would also still be burning. In Norfolk it had rained all day, in Twickenham it had cleared. In the Dales the weather had been mixed and in Edinburgh the rain had come through the roof during Dr Hill’s lecture. At the vicarage in Sunbury the thermometer had touched seventy-two degrees and in London the price of bread was 11¾ the quartern loaf, and three per cent consols stood at 56½.

  ‘All happy families resemble one another,’ said Tolstoy, ‘every unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion’ and for the vast majority of the country the day had passed unrecorded. People had married, people had died, children had been born. They had gone to church in the morning, they had gone to church in the afternoon, they had gone to evening service, they had not gone at all. They had pottered in their gardens and had almost finished taking in their hay. They had driven through the park to Knightsbridge and taken tea for the first time with the woman they would marry. They had drowned in the Tay going to hear Chalmers preach and been rescued in the Exe. They had read Waverley and they had read The Velvet Cushion. They were well, they were not well, they were writing up their diaries, they were leaving the day blank. In his chambers the barrister Crabb Robinson had just this minute finished with his law books for the night, and was filling in his journal. He had not got home from the Lambs’ until almost one in the morning, he recorded, and had breakfasted with the Wordsworths at nine. Wordsworth had not been there, but he had waited for him and ended not leaving until two. Stuart of the Courier had been there, and talking confidently of the allies’ success. Scott, too, of The Champion – ‘a little swarthy man with rather an unpleasant expression of countenance’ – just returned from Paris and full of French politics. And Haydon, the painter, whom he had never met before: Haydon had an animated countenance, but had not said much. Both he and Scott had seemed to entertain a high reverence for Wordsworth. They had talked of Wilkie’s Distraining for Rent and agreed that he was no colourist and not getting any better. Then dinner with the Colliers, tea with Mrs Barbauld – she and her friends had not liked Wordsworth’s ‘White Doe’ – and back home along the river for an hour with his law books, his journal and bed.

  A perfectly ordinary end to an ordinary day, and as the Saturday mail-coaches thundered through the night carrying news of the deaths of three soldiers in the Gurkha War six months before, it was the same across Britain. Farington had been writing up his journal too, reminding himself to secure a ticket to see Mr Angerstein’s paintings for a friend of Mrs Worsley. Across the park from Melbourne House, Byron would be walking home with that lame, sliding gait of his, oblivious to the fate of his fictional double in Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon. In Marlborough Street, Haydon’s Centurion would still be waiting for his sleeve to be painted. In Bedford Square, ‘Classic’ Hallam had come home from Murray’s to a new son. At her townhouse Sophie Trower, whose brother in the 16th had charged to the Scots Greys’ rescue, was unhappy with a bad cough. Across the garden from Hazlitt, Jeremy Bentham was in the middle of an interminable letter to the Emperor Alexander on prison reform. At Calne in Wiltshire, that other great seer of the age, Coleridge, had been dictating his Biographia Literaria. In Bath, Mrs Piozzi had ‘Cramps and Pains all over the Epigastric region which our Ladies call Spasms and the Spaniards Flatos’, and in Newgate another week was beginning that might bring news of the Recorder’s report.

  Down at Arundel, John Binstead was getting acquainted with the marshalman, Fogg, and somewhere near Haymarket, Samuel Halliday was thinking about another expedition to Copt Hall. Up in Glasgow thieves were breaking into a cloth warehouse, and farther north on the east coast, in his ne
wly dug Achany chapel grave, the body of the tacksman, Captain Gordon, was enjoying its last undisturbed night of rest. On the other side of the country, off the west coast on the Isle of Scalpaigh, it would still be light enough to make out the bloody bundle beside the cairn, but in England it was already dark and the Planet Herschel visible in the night sky to the naked eye. ‘It souths now a little before midnight,’ the Carlisle Journal informed its readers, ‘is pale & less vivid than the fixed stars near it in Scorpio. It will remain in company with Antares for 2 or 3 years, passing north of it about the middle of 1816, and veering to the east at the rate of 40.18 annually, being nearly seven years in passing one sign and nearly 84 in making an entire revolution. The diameter of herself is 35,220 miles, whereas that of the earth is only 7,970. Its distance from the sun is 1,816,455,000 which is so prodigious that a cannonball from the planet to the sun, moving at the rate of 8 miles a minute would not reach the latter in less than about 430 years.’

  Here was a thought to make Xerxes and Augustus Frazer more than weep. Ten miles off the French coast, where the weather was moderate and the breeze south-south-west, the Bellerophon and Myrmidon were going about their silent, unseen business. Somewhere out in the southern Atlantic, a tiny speck in an immense ocean, the Baring transport was carrying a young midshipman, Thomas Whyte, to begin a fourteen-year sentence for killing a man in a drunken brawl at Leith docks. In Botany Bay, Agnes Findlater from Glasgow – guilty of stealing ‘two women’s slips, two soft muslin Neckcloths … three others of soft Muslin … two pairs of women’s stockings, a woman’s Bed gown, striped and a white petticoat’ – and another 110 females of the Northampton were stepping ashore to start their new lives.

  The day of Waterloo had ended. On the Scottish east coast, where the Halls would be waiting for word of their new son-in-law, the waves would be breaking against the rocks of Siccar Point. And as an English soldier stood guard over Frederick Ponsonby, and his sister, Caroline Lamb, scribbled herself into oblivion, in a field near the castle at Windsor, where the poor, mad old king lay oblivious to his country’s triumphs, William Herschel’s giant telescope pointed up to a universe utterly indifferent to it all.

  PART II

  The Opening of the Vials

  ‘What wonderful changes! The battle of Waterloo is gained! And Wellington has beat Napoleon in person, and with an inferior force. The battle has raised the English character even higher than it ever before stood, and makes one proud indeed of having been born in the country which produced a Wellington.’

  Frances, Lady Shelley

  ‘Jesu, what gotho-barbaric rejoicing – like alleluias of the Druids chanting round the great idol of straw, full of victims. What horrors, what slaughters, what a terrible judgement of God on the blind and brutal fury of the French. How many arms and legs off, how many brains scattered on the ground, what a catalogue of martyrs, dead or cut to pieces whilst still alive. Never have such important and strong tidings come to my ears; all the other victories pall before it – it is a Trafalgar on land, which one cannot deny, raises Wellington in a colossal manner.’

  William Beckford

  For the last two decades the English mail had been the principal instrument of national intelligence, and if ever there was a time and event designed to show it up in all its glory, it was the June of 1815 and the Battle of Waterloo. On any night of the year the departure of the mails was one of the great sights of London, with the coaches drawn up in double-file the length of Lombard Street, every part of every coach inspected and polished, every horse – ‘Horses! can these be horses?’ ‘bounding leopards’, ‘cheetahs’ rather, wrote Thomas De Quincey – groomed as if it had just stepped out of a royal mews, and in times of ‘Victory’ it took on a near mystical significance.

  Nobody – not even Dickens – has written of the mails as Thomas De Quincey did, no one felt their living role in the life of the nation, no one traced their arterial paths across the body politic with such a loving and almost forensic intentness. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars there were more than a hundred provincial newspapers reaching from Truro to Inverness, and yet for De Quincey it was almost as if some tacit pact had been agreed, and in return for all the riches and goods that fed into the insatiable maw of London from the ports, countryside and manufacturing towns of Britain – in exchange for all those herds that tramped the drover roads towards the great hecatomb of Smithfield – out flowed along the radiating lines of the mail-coaches the news, opinion, propaganda, reports, foreign intelligences, debates, scandals and tragedies that made up the collective life of the nation.

  De Quincey loved everything about the mail-coaches – he loved their beauty and the intricacy of their organisation, he loved their speed as they surged through the blackness of the night, he loved the sense of surrogate power as turnpikes opened and panicking carts hurried out of their path, he loved their companionship, he loved the England he could see as dawn broke and the Bath Mail emerged out of the gloom of Savernake Forest – and above all he loved the organic sense of a country united by the joy and grief of war that for twenty years had been the backdrop of his life.

  ‘On any night the spectacle was beautiful,’ he wrote, but on one of those magic nights when the news of a great battle had reached England – Trafalgar, the Nile, the Glorious First of June, the Basque Roads, Talavera, Albuera – and horses, men and coaches were all decked out in laurels, flowers, leaves and ribbons, then one ‘heart, one pride, one glory’ connected ‘every man by the transcendent bond of his English blood’. ‘Every moment are shouted aloud by the Post-Office servants the great ancestral names of cities known to history through a thousand years, Lincoln, Winchester, Portsmouth, Gloucester, Oxford, Bristol, Manchester, York, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Perth, Glasgow – expressing the grandeur of the empire by the antiquity of its towns … What stir! – What sea-like ferment! – what a thundering of wheels, what a trampling of horses! – what farewell cheers – connecting the name of the particular mail – “Liverpool for ever!” – with the name of the particular victory – “Badajos for ever!” or “Salamanca for ever!” The half-slumbering consciousness that, all night long and all the next day’ – and longer again for some – ‘many of these mails, like fire racing along a train of gunpowder, will be kindling at every instant new successions of burning joy, has an obscure effect multiplying to the imagination into infinity the stages of its progressive diffusion. A fiery arrow seems to be let loose, which from that moment is destined to travel, almost without intermission, westwards for three hundred miles – northwards for six hundred; and the sympathy of our Lombard Street friends at parting is exalted hundredfold by a sort of visionary sympathy with the approaching sympathies, yet unborn, which we were going to evoke.’

  ‘The mail-coaches it was,’ wrote De Quincey, ‘that distributed over the face of the land, like the opening of the apocalyptic vials, the heart-shaking news’ of battles, and for more than a week now this Britain of towns and villages and isolated farmhouses had been waiting for the news that would not come. Night after night, through these middle days of June – as the Duke of Brunswick’s coffin was nailed down in Antwerp and ladies lay fully dressed on their beds in Brussels – the women and children of De Quincey’s England stood at their windows, waving their handkerchiefs or listening in the dark for the piercing trumpet sound of the mail’s approach, and waited and waited in vain.

  They were used to living with this suspense – used to those terrible waits between the first joyous news of a Trafalgar and the grim arrival of the casualty returns – but that had never made it any easier, and the tantalising proximity of the Low Countries made it only worse. On the morning of the battle churchgoers in Kent had clearly heard the sound of cannon from across the Channel, but if one imagines the shockwaves of a blast or a stone dropped into a pool at Waterloo, the first ripple of news would have only reached England some thirty hours later, spreading out then in widening circles, traceable in the letters, diaries, and newspapers of the day –
the City first, Downing Street on the night of the 21st, London on the 22nd, Liverpool late on Friday 23rd, Keswick the 24th, Jersey and Edinburgh the 25th, the Scottish Highlands in early July – before spreading westwards to Ireland and America and eastward to the Persian Gulf and India, to break finally on the shores of Bombay some four months later. ‘We lose not a moment in publishing the following most important and glorious intelligence,’ a Bombay Courier Extraordinary announced on 27 October, ‘by a Dow which has arrived from the Persian Gulf, a letter has been received from the Broker of the Honourable Company, dated the 1st of September, conveying the gratifying intelligence that Lord Wellington had completely defeated Buonaparte near Brussels, and taken the whole artillery consisting of 300 piece of cannon. The packets containing the glorious intelligence had been received by the broker at Bussorah but have not yet reached the government.’

  Long before those slow, inexorable ripples had lapped against the shores of British India, though, days even before they reached a waiting England, a newly married young woman had watched them seep beneath the locked door of an Antwerp room where she thought nothing could find her. For the three days since the night of the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, Magdalene De Lancey had been living in a cocoon of her own, sealed away from the outside world, her eyes shut to the sights and turmoil of a nervous, jumpy Antwerp, her ears blocked against the clatter of carts carrying the wounded and the distant rumble of cannon that she told herself was the sea.

  She had spent the Sunday in a state of unhappy, febrile restlessness, irritable with her maid Emma and physically and emotionally exhausted by a wait that had already gone on longer than she had ever dreamed possible. Over these last days she had told herself time and again that nothing could happen to her husband, and it was only early on the morning of the 19th – twelve hours after the end of the battle – when an officer on his staff arrived with the first lists of dead and wounded to assure her that De Lancey was safe that she realised just how little she had believed it herself. ‘I asked him repeatedly if he was sure,’ she recalled, ‘and if he had seen any of his writing, or if he had heard from him … I now found how much I had really feared by the wild spirits I got into. I walked up and down, for I could not rest, and was almost in a fever with happiness.’