Went the Day Well?

by David Crane

  Nothing could better illustrate the strange time warp within which Waterloo was fought and the news of it received than Miss Dalrymple’s diary. On the day of the battle she had been at church in the morning to hear Mr Moodie preach from Philippians, and for the same week that out in Belgium a whole life had been crushed into a few days, a whole world of love, grief and loss shrunk to a shared wooden cot in a Belgian hovel, Miss Christian Dalrymple had a couple of lectures on theology, a visit to the hot baths at Portobello for her limbs, a dose of Cheltenham salts on the Wednesday, a consultation with Dr Waldrof regarding her eyes on Thursday, and a Tuesday evening of playing Loo.

  The hypochondriacal Miss Dalrymple was not unusual in any of this – except perhaps in the course of leeches for her eyes that Dr Waldrof prescribed – and across the country the world had gone on as it always had. In the days before Waterloo, Britain had the air of some nineteenth-century Pompeii on the eve of the eruption, and to look at the newspapers and letters of the early part of the week after the battle – at the announcements for the performance of Richard II at Drury Lane or the news that in the churchyard at Kincardine, up on the north-east coast of Scotland, an angry mob had dug up the body of a newly buried suicide, dragged it down to the seashore, flung it into a hole between the high- and low-tide marks, and reburied it under a pile of rocks – is like watching a Britain still unconscious that Vesuvius had blown and the ash that will bury her old world was already darkening the sky.

  The battle had not stopped a rusty Robert Southey struggling with his son’s Greek, or brought Shelley back from a walking tour in Wales. It had not prompted the young medical student, John Keats, to join Charles Bell in Belgium or put an end to the great Howard clan celebrations at Arundel. It had not dampened the ‘brilliant display of fireworks’ at Vauxhall under the patronage of the Prince Regent or stopped the Fashionables coming to the Countess of Buckingham’s ‘splendid dejeune’ in Grosvenor Square, as if nothing else mattered under the sun, but that sun was already disappearing. On the morning of Monday 19th the crowds in Piccadilly were still queuing to see Lefebvre’s portrait of Bonaparte, but even as the papers wondered where the Emperor was, and Magdalene De Lancey struggled against the flotsam of war on the Brussels road, a semi-mythical messenger of Victory and Death out of some drug-fuelled De Quincey dream – a ‘Gentleman of Ghent’, a Mr C., an agent called Roworth in the pay of Nathan Rothschild, nobody was quite sure who he was – was already on his way to England to spill the last apocalyptic seal over Mrs Piozzi’s Regency world.

  There had been a badly scrambled account of a battle, brought over on the packet Maria from Ostend to Colchester on the night of the 18th/19th, but for Regency England’s anti-Semites, subsequent mythology and conspiracy theorists alike, only a Rothschild spy has ever properly fitted the bill. In the pre-dawn hours after the battle Wellington had sat down to begin his official despatch to the War Minister Lord Bathurst, but before he had even started – in one variant of the story at least – a courier had already been on the road for hours, racing to bring the news of the victory from Brussels to Nathan Rothschild at his London New Court offices before either government or City had word of it.

  On the floor of the ‘Change’ information was money, and in the age before the telegraph, the network of couriers, riders, cross-Channel clippers, mail-guards, smugglers and carrier pigeons that the Rothschild brothers had established across Europe had made Nathan the best-informed man in England. There is so much myth surrounding the news of Waterloo that it is impossible to be certain about exact times, but while Wellington’s aide-de-camp, Major Henry Percy, was still fretting on the tide at Ostend with the official Waterloo despatch, Rothschild’s man was already – allegedly – in 2 New Court and Nathan Rothschild in possession of the news.

  ‘The messenger who was employed … was ordered to call on the King of France at Brussels [in fact Ghent] on his way,’ the Secretary to the Admiralty, the unlovable John Wilson Croker used to recall: ‘He did so, then proceeded to the Rothschilds. After they had extracted from him all the information that he possessed, they sent him on to Lord Liverpool, the Prime Minister, in order that the Government might receive tidings of this great event.’ Liverpool could make no sense of what the man was telling him, and Croker himself, after he had been sent for, was faring no better when, ‘about to give up in despair … and by a sudden impulse’, he questioned the messenger as to his interview with the French king. ‘How was he dressed? he asked him.

  “In his dressing-gown.”

  What did he say and do?

  “His Majesty embraced me, and kissed me!”

  “How did the King kiss you?”

  “On both cheeks,” replied the messenger, upon which Mr Croker emphatically exclaimed:

  “My Lord, it is true; his news is genuine.”’

  The courier had reached New Court early in the morning of the 20th – The Times reported unusual trading activity on the floor of the Exchange that day – but Lord Liverpool had no means of knowing whether Croker was right and kept the news to himself. There was a persistent rumour that Rothschild had in fact learned of the battle by carrier pigeon on the Monday, but whatever the truth of that it was only the following night – a day-and-a-half later – that a chaise and four, carrying Major Percy and the Waterloo despatch, with two captured French Imperial eagles jutting out through the windows, and a noisy and growing crowd in tow, was heard rattling up Whitehall towards Downing Street and Horse Guards.

  Percy had not seen a bed in a week – fragments of a man’s brains, those of an officer killed next to him, fell out of his sash when he eventually got out of his bloodied uniform that night – and it had been an exhausting journey. He had not left Brussels until the noon of the 19th, and when the HMS Peruvian was becalmed mid-Channel he was forced to take to one of the ship’s boats, and with the help of the captain and four sailors row himself and the eagles to the Kent coast, where – in a bizarre echo of the Cochrane Stock Exchange fraud – he had beached the boat at Broadstairs and taken a fast carriage for London.

  It was ten at night before Percy arrived in Downing Street, where an alarmed Charles Arbuthnot, brought to the window by the sound of a mob, was the first in government to see the eagles. Nobody at Horse Guards seemed sure where Lord Bathurst had gone for the evening, and while a courier was sent to track him down, the dishevelled and bloodstained Percy set off in search of Lord Liverpool, emptying houses of their ball guests and Whites of its members as his chaise with the eagles drove through Mayfair towards Grosvenor Square.

  The prime minister had been dining at the cantankerous Lord Harrowby’s that night – Bathurst was with Lord Grey and the Earl of Jersey – and it was there that Percy at last found him. In one account he burst into the room shouting ‘Victory, a Victory!’, but his own, more bathetic version – saved by a relative – has an air of anti-climax about it that smacks of historical truth:

  ‘“You must immediately come with me to the Regent,” Liverpool told him, hustling him out into the square where a crowd had again gathered, and into his own carriage.

  “But what is to be done with the eagles?”

  “Let the footman carry them,” said Lord Liverpool.

  This did not seem to Percy any way to treat the eagles, and taking them with him, he drove with Lord Liverpool to Mrs Boehme’s house in St James’s Square, where the Prince Regent and Duke of York were dining. The prime minister took Percy up to the prince and introducing him as Major Percy, announced that he had come “with the news of great victory for your Royal Highness”.

  “Not Major Percy, but Lieut-Colonel Percy,” said the prince. Major Percy knelt and kissed his hand. “We have not suffered much loss, I hope,” he then said.

  “The loss has been very great indeed,” was of course the reply, upon which the prince burst into tears. Major Percy afterwards went to his brother’s house in Gloucester Place, and called him up to hear the good news, and then to Portman Square, where he undressed and went
to bed for the first time since the battle.’

  It was two in the morning before Percy finally got out of his uniform – he was too exhausted to be on time for his appointment with the Duke of York the next day – but by that time small pockets of London already knew the news. In the years to come men and women would arrogate this historic moment to their own lives, and it would have been odd when every family in England had its own Waterloo legend, if an arch-mythologiser, egotist, patriot and hero-worshipper of Benjamin Haydon’s stamp, had not pushed his way to the front of events. ‘I had spent the evening with John Scott who lived in the Edgware Road,’ Haydon wrote, ‘I had stayed rather late, and was coming home to Great Marlborough Street, when in crossing Portman Square a messenger from the Foreign Office came right up to me and said, “Which is Lord Harrowby’s? The Duke has beat Napoleon, taking one hundred and fifty pieces of cannon, and is marching on Paris.”

  “Is it true?” said I, quite bewildered.

  “True!” said he … Scott began to ask questions. I said, “None of your questions; it is a fact,” and both of us said “huzza!”’

  It is impossible to know whether any of this is true or not – though if the Prince Regent, the future George IV, could come to believe that he had been at the battle himself it would be hard to hold it against Haydon – and the euphoria was real enough. In the weeks before Waterloo he had been forced to put up with Leigh Hunt’s teasing banter as to what Bonaparte would do to his ‘Master Wellington’, and now the boot was on the other foot, his faith justified, the duke enshrined in the pantheon of deities, the ‘vain and impudent French’ put in their place, the boasts of the Old Guard that ‘Napoleon n’étais jamais battu’ silenced, and the scoffers – ‘Terrible battle this, Haydon. A glorious one, Hunt’ – routed. ‘Sammons my model and corporal of the 2nd Life Guards came and we tried to do our duty,’ Haydon noted on the 23rd, ‘but Sammons was in such a fidget about his regiment charging, and I myself was in such a heat, I was obliged to let him go. Away he went, and I never saw him till late the next day, and he then came drunk with talking. I read the Gazette the last thing before going to bed. I dreamt of it and was fighting all night; I got up in a steam of feeling and read the Gazette again, ordered a Courier for a month, called at a confectioner’s and read all the papers till I was faint.’

  Never, as Haydon never ceased to tell people, had there ever been a time like this. And as the guns boomed across the city from the Tower, and crowds jostled and pressed around copies of the Gazette, and London came to terms with the best and worst of the news, the mail-coaches in Lombard Street were being decked out in their garlands and ribbons. It was the turn of the rest of the country to learn the cost of victory.

  For all the triumphalism of Benjamin Haydon, there would not have been a town in Britain that had not reason to fear, hardly a family as Byron put it, that had escaped ‘havoc’s tender mercies’, and in a society that industrialisation had not yet changed out of all recognition the anxieties would have been multiplied fifty-fold. In many ways the old loyalties and structures that bound the country together had already loosened beyond repair, but the Britain that fought Waterloo was still recognisably a country of defined and integrated communities in which each anxiety would have been a common one and every death a shared loss.

  This would be true of the Highlands of Scotland when the news finally reached them, true of the island communities where the memories of Waterloo would echo down the century, true of the close-knit professional world of Edinburgh, true of the parishes of England and Wales and the villages of Ireland, and of nowhere was it truer than of the aristocratic class that had provided Wellington with his officers. Twenty years of war might have done a great deal to dilute the social exclusivity of the army, but for Lord Harrowby’s guests one glance at the killed and wounded lists in Wellington’s despatch would have been enough to show the appalling price that Sydney Smith’s ‘Golden Parallelogram’ of aristocratic privilege, wit and beauty had paid for victory.

  The families of the men on those lists all knew each other, were interconnected by marriage, sat together in Parliament, raced their horses against each other, were members of the same clubs – Sir William Ponsonby, the son of Lord Ponsonby, whose wife’s miniature was found on his body, was connected to the Bessboroughs, the Spencers, the Lambs, the Fitzroys, the Greys, the Devonshires – and each death spilled across party and generations to engulf a whole world in a tide of grief. ‘I saw a man who was by Sir Wm Ponsonby when he fell,’ Lady Capel, Uxbridge’s sister, wrote from Brussels – just one of a cache of family letters that preserves in aspic the great surge of collective misery that a single death caused; ‘he says he suffered nothing that his death was instantaneous that he never spoke after his first wound, his aide-de-camp came to Brussels more dead than alive. My son saw him immediately and thought he would have fainted as he walked up stairs … He went next morning & found the body it was known by the sweet smile which was still visible on his fine countenance where goodness and kindness were marked with such Strong Lines that it was impossible to mistake him – I saw him a few hours before the final battle and his countenance, his smile, the place where I saw him still haunt me.’

  ‘My dear Lord I can no longer delay to ask how dear Lady Grey is’ … ‘tell me how Ly Ponsonby is’ … ‘I trembled for the effect the shock might have upon her’ … ‘I have now experienced almost the greatest misfortune I could suffer’ … ‘Adieu my dear dear Mary you know how I loved William’ … ‘Poor Georgiana’ – a whole society was coming to terms with loss, anxiety, fear, grief, anger and all those haunting feelings of unresolved and unresolvable guilt that sudden death leaves behind. ‘I hired a horse to ride out to enquire concerning a point which occupied my whole soul,’ wrote John Cam Hobhouse, still trapped in France three weeks after the battle and unaware that his brother, Ben, had been killed at Quatre Bras. Like so many others he had read the first lists of the dead and wounded and breathed a sigh of relief, only to discover ‘how sadly’ he was mistaken, and ‘what a wound’ was to be made in his heart by the loss of ‘the most affectionate, the bravest, and the most honourable of men … I never did anything in my life for my poor brother … I was not unkind, that is all I can say for myself, either with respect to him or any of my family. I envy him as I do everyone who has lived honourably and ceased to live.’

  A century later, an MP standing up in the House of Commons would celebrate the ‘Roman virtues’ of Britain’s women, but in this summer of 1815, as wives and mothers waited for news, or blocked their ears to the news, or refused to believe it, or hoped against hope that it was not true, there was very little sign of any such restraint. ‘If you have the least news for God’s sake send it me,’ a frantic Lady Caroline Lamb – another cousin of William Ponsonby – wrote to Murray, ‘the sort of agitation I have been in all day cannot be conceived … pray let us know when the messenger comes … if you will send to me it will relieve my mind – I cannot go out anywhere – I was near calling upon you … The last accounts I heard of my Brother were written by poor General Pack – he said these words & they were addressed to an utter stranger to all of us – Ponsonby is quite idolised by the whole army he is one of our most gallant officers.’

  For those out in Brussels or Ghent one of the most familiar sights of these days after the battle was of men openly weeping in the streets, and at home the shock was more than many could bear. ‘There are hopes,’ reported the Caledonian Mercury on 29 June, ‘that the Hon. Major Howard, of the 10th Hussars, who had been reckoned among the killed in the late action, is merely missing. The lady of this officer is far advanced in pregnancy, and the account of his death had had so melancholy an effect on her, that she has never spoken since she heard it.’

  ‘When the wife of Major Nogg heard that her husband had been killed,’ Lady Frances Shelley noted in her journal, ‘she did not speak and died two days later’ but as Magdalene De Lancey had bitterly discovered, uncertainty carried its own miseries. �
��Vague reports have been made of the numbers slain on both sides,’ the Morning Chronicle warned its readers, ‘and the names of distinguished persons have been too lightly mentioned as having fallen. We should not quote them if our silence could prevent the spread of disastrous intelligence. But to shew how vaguely the names of officers are stated, we shall particularise those of Lord James Hay, brother of the Marquis of Tweeddale, and James Lord Hay, son of the Earl of Errol. Both of these gallant young men were with the Army, and one of them is said to have fallen, yet both are indiscriminately named.’

  It was not just the Tweeddales and Errols and Howards who clung on to fading hopes and faced the same agonising wait. ‘I can say no more about plays,’ the dramatist and blue-stocking, Joanna Baillie, wrote to Walter Scott – she had been in the middle of a letter about Kean and Byron when the Gazette and the casualty lists had been brought in – ‘and tho’ our two young men we have good reason to believe are safe, I can think of nothing else. Everybody around me is anxiously waiting for news of their friends … Mrs Baillie whose nephew is in the Guards is by me just now, pacing up and down in a most anxious manner, and our good friend and neighbour Mrs Miligan has her eldest son there also. In short we are all less or more in a state of misery till the returns of the killed and wounded are received.’

  ‘We have claimed a victory and illuminated while mo[u]rning in sackcloth would be more suitable,’ complained Samuel Kevan, a slater and member of the Reformed Presbyterian Church, in his Sabbath-day journal for the 25th, but the truth was that wherever you turned in Britain parents and wives of every class were wearing their sackcloth. ‘To the mind’s eye haunted by faces it shall never see again, – to voices missed in the circle, to vacant seats at the table, – to widows waking in the morning’ – ‘to the fatherless, the childless, the husbandless’ – what to them are ‘the common feelings of hostility or of triumph’? demanded Hunt’s Examiner, and across the country families bore testimony to its truth. ‘The most painful duty I have ever performed is to acquaint you that Dear John is no more,’ wrote the father of Captain John Blackman of the Coldstream Guards, that other Westminster boy at Waterloo saying his prayers on the morning of the 18th. ‘He died in the field of battle, instantly on receiving a shot through his head … To know that his body was found and interred is some consolation, and to be assured he was not mangled, as very many others were, alleviates us a little … God bless his memory.’