Went the Day Well?

by David Crane

  The authorities were not ready to rest with her death, though, and if it seemed ludicrous to Leigh Hunt that The Times could pause from celebrating the slaughter of ‘Hecatombs of Frenchmen’ to hound the memory of a mere servant girl, Liverpool’s government had never been slow to break a butterfly upon a wheel. In the immediate hours after her execution a Newgate turnkey was suborned into signing an affidavit fixing Eliza Fenning’s guilt, and over the next week this was printed in government-backed papers and turned into handbills, ‘thrown into houses, dropped upon shop counters, exhibited in windows and circulated widely’ in an extraordinary London-wide attempt to blacken her name.

  This was one battle, though, they were not going to win, and to the heavenly crown that Wansbrough had prophesied for Eliza, her supporters were determined to add immortality of a very different kind. In the immediate aftermath of her death her wretched parents had managed to borrow the 14/6 to recover her body from Newgate’s dead house, and from the moment that the authorities lost control of her body they lost control of her reputation, gifting radical England and London’s poor a victim of burgeoning mythological status that no smear campaign could contain. ‘My aching heart with pity bled,’ began one execution ballad,

  When poor Eliza! Cloth’d in white;

  At Newgate dropp’d her lovely head,

  And clos’d her eyes in endless night.

  …

  Poor hopeless maid! For poison try’d!

  Which caus’d her sad untimely death,

  She vow’d that innocent she died,

  And seal’d it with her parting breath.

  This might be no more than the standard, ephemeral stuff of popular Georgian culture – the Last Words, the Confession, the Execution Ballad – but the authorities would have made a bad mistake if they had underestimated its power over the poor, the sad and dispossessed of London to whom Eliza Fenning now belonged. ‘SUICIDE,’ the Morning Chronicle reported on 15 August, almost three weeks after Fenning’s death. ‘Friday an Inquest was held at the Clayton Arms, Kennington … on the body of Mary Bailey’, a young servant girl of twenty-two – Eliza’s age – who was found kneeling by her bed in an attitude of prayer, ‘her throat cut in shocking manner with a large carving knife’, only minutes after she was seen listening to a ‘ballad singer, singing one of those doleful ditties on the death of Eliza Fenning’, and sighing to herself ‘ah, poor Eliza …’.

  It was not just the poor, the lonely and the insane who identified with her fate, however, but that cohesive, respectable chapel-going community to which she had belonged. Her parents had taken her body from Newgate back to their house by Red Lion Square, and while constables tried to prevent visitors making the pilgrimage up the one flight of stairs to the back room where she lay ‘in state’, they could not stop the Fennings’ world turning her funeral into a defiant protest against injustice, with an immense crowd 10,000 strong – shadowed the whole way by peace officers – following the body and ‘six young females, attired in white’ supporting the pall. ‘Not the slightest accident, however, occurred,’ reported the pro-Tory Times, ‘and the procession of mourners, &c, returned in the same order it came by the Foundling, Lamb’s-conduit-street, &c. The vigilance of the officers, in preserving order, was highly meritorious.’

  The authorities might have preferred it, in fact, if it had not all been so orderly – there was nothing a government liked more than an opportunity to play the mob card to frighten the decent, respectable, nervous, patriotic servant-owning class back into line – but even so the Fenning case had sounded a note that they knew to fear. Like every government going back to Pitt’s in the 1790s, Lord Liverpool’s Cabinet saw every protest as part of a wider conspiracy, and in Eliza Fenning they found the sum of all their fears: not just a woman whose foul crime held a particular horror for the nineteenth century, or a servant whose betrayal undermined the whole class system, but a cause that had brought out of the woodwork all those dissident, radical, reforming elements that over the next seventeen years would remorselessly chip away at the foundations of the most perfect constitution imaginable to man.

  The battle lines had been drawn. Lord Liverpool’s government had not fought and won the war to lose the peace, but neither had the men who stood by Eliza Fenning sacrificed so much over twenty years to lie quietly down now. Within months the hapless Samuel Halliday and John Binstead would die on the same Newgate gallows, victims of a system devoted to the preservation of property and the status quo. Within four years habeas corpus would be suspended and the notorious Peterloo Massacre – not simply a bad word-play – remind even John Bull that when whole populations could be bartered across the continent and crofting communities brutally driven from their Scottish homes, Peterloo and Waterloo were two sides of the same coin. As an indignant Benjamin Haydon – outraged that a government could turn on the same loyal, brave, steadfast British people who had paid their taxes, fought their battles, and beaten Bonaparte – wrote in his diary, Lord Castlereagh and his ilk had spent too much time with their autocratic Russian and Austrian allies. He had a point. There was little that Lord Liverpool’s government, with its spy networks and agents provocateurs, its campaigns of vilification and penchant for legalised violence could have learned from Metternich’s police. For all that, though, a watershed had been reached. The Tory press, quoting Lord Ellenborough’s old mentor, the ‘Protestant Jesuit’ William Paley, might confidently tell Eliza Fenning’s friends that if she were innocent they should console themselves that she had ‘died for her country’ in the higher cause of the Law. ‘The Law’, though – Ellenborough’s law, Silvester’s law, Sidmouth’s law – was not going to have it its own way. And at least one of its victims would not be forgotten. By the mid-1840s Eliza Fenning would have been with her siblings in the St George the Martyr burial ground for thirty years, but chemists would still be carrying out laboratory experiments to prove her innocence, and men who had never seen her die would still be writing rhapsodically of the ‘beauteous innocent creature’, as spotless in her dress ‘as her own purity’, whose soul had been ‘caught up by attending angels and carried to the heaven of eternal bliss’.

  Myth Triumphant

  ‘I’ll weave a gay garland with Laurels entwining,

  Round Roses and Thistles and Shamrocks combining,

  I’ll weave a gay garland with Olives entwining

  To crown our famed Heroes who fought Waterloo …’

  To the tune of ‘Garland of Love’

  ‘Waterloo, in its ultimate significance, is the considered triumph of counter-revolution. It is Europe versus France, St Petersburg, Berlin, and Vienna versus Paris, the status quo versus the new order … the move to action-stations of monarchy against the indomitable upheaval of the French people. To subdue that great people which had been in a state of eruption for twenty-six years, such was the aim, an affirmation of solidarity between the Houses of Brunswick, Nassau, Romanoff, Hohenzollern, and Hapsburg, and the House of Bourbon. Waterloo was the assertion of the Divine Right of Kings.’

  Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

  ‘Have not the efforts of the British Nation been gigantic?’ Benjamin Haydon had asked himself five days after Waterloo. ‘Think of her Naval Victories – St Jean, St Vincent, Nile, Copenhagen, Trafalgar, then of Vimeiro, Talavera, Fuentes d’Honoro, Salamanca, Vittoria, Orthes, Pyrenees. Think of her treasure in coalescing Europe, & now again this battle … Think of her Glories in India, and her subduing all the Colonies of the World. To such Glories she wants but the glories of my noble Art to make her the grandest Nation in the World, and this she shall have if God spare my life. Grant it, Amen.’

  By the time that those words were first published in 1853, Haydon and all his hopes had been dead seven years, having cut his throat and shot himself during the murderously hot summer of 1846. There was probably nobody who had felt or captured the excitement of the Hundred Days like Haydon had done, and it is just one more sad irony to pile on those other ironies of his life
that the one artist in England whose self-esteem and dedication to History Painting were a match for the new spirit of national pride in the air, was the man without the technique or the painterly imagination to realise his vision.

  ‘Poor Haydon!’ Elizabeth Barrett wrote of him after his death, ‘think what an agony life was to him, so constituted! – his own genius a clinging curse! the fire and the clay in him seething and quenching one another! – the man seeing maniacally in all men the assassins of his fame! And, with the whole world against him, struggling with the thing that was his life, through night and day, in thoughts and in dreams – struggling, stifling, breaking the hearts of the creatures dearest to him, in the conflict for which there was no victory … Tell me if Laocoon’s anguish was not an infant’s sleep compared to this?’

  None of this had stopped him painting interminable, dreadful portraits of Napoleon in exile – twenty-five at his last count – or endless, equally terrible Wellingtons ‘Brooding on the Field of Waterloo’, but they had not been what he had wanted for his heroes. From his earliest days as an artist he had despised the ‘namby-pamby’ business of portrait-painting as unworthy of his genius, and if he was going to paint the great men of the age, he would have shown them as he had done his mighty Curtius, leaping his horse into the void, and not daubed on another jobbing St Helena canvas that he could knock off in two hours for £50.

  It would not have made it any easier for Haydon, a man who saw assassins lurking in every room, that it was the great friend, rival and companion of his Paris adventures, David Wilkie, whose celebration of Waterloo had caught the public’s imagination. In the summer of 1815, Wilkie had inadvertently upset his wealthy Tory patrons with his Distraining for Rent, but the ‘Scots Teniers’ was nothing if not canny, and when the next summer the Duke of Wellington approached him with a commission no one could have been more biddable. ‘I should not perhaps have been disposed to break through the etiquette of writing you before you have written me from the country,’ Wilkie wrote to Haydon in August 1816, a letter that is a genre picture in itself: ‘had it not been that I have a piece of intelligence to give you of an event that is to me more gratifying than any honour or compliment I have yet had conferred on me. It is that of being waited on by His Grace the Duke of Wellington …’ The previous day, he continued, Lord Lynedoch – Wellington’s old Peninsula general, Sir Thomas Graham – had arrived to tell him that if Wilkie ‘should be at home at four o’clock the Duke of Wellington and a party’ would call on him. He had spent the rest of the day tidying his rooms and laying out his canvases for viewing, and – ‘last, though not least’ – having arranged it so that his mother and sister ‘might see the great man through the parlour windows’, set himself ‘in a sort of breathless expectation’ to wait for the hour to come.

  The duke had arrived with the Duke and Duchess of Bedford, Lady Argyle and Lord Lynedoch, and at first Wilkie had been discomposed at his silence. It was left to Lady Argyle to explain that he wanted to commission a picture, and she had just begun to say what he had in mind, when the duke, who was ‘looking at one of the pictures that happened to be on the ground’, swung round on his chair, ‘turned up his lively eye to me and said the subject should be a parcel of soldiers, assembled together on the seats at the door of a public house’ in Chelsea’s King’s road, ‘chewing tobacco and talking over their old stories’.

  Wilkie assured him that this would make a beautiful picture, ‘and that it only wanted some story or principal incident to connect the figures together’ and ‘proposed that one might be reading a newspaper aloud to the rest’. The duke was immediately taken with the idea and as he and his party prepared to leave, made Wilkie a bow and asked when he should hear from him: ‘To which I replied that my immediate engagements … would prevent me being able to get it done for two years. “Very well,” said he, “that will be soon enough for me.” They then went downstairs … and seeing some of my family at the parlour windows, he bowed to them also. As he got upon his horse he observed all the families and the servants were at the windows … The sensation this event occasioned quite unhinged us for the rest of the day … The chair he happened to sit upon has been carefully selected out, and has been decorated with ribbons, and there is talk of having an inscription upon it, descriptive of the honour it has received.’

  It was just as well the duke was in no hurry for his painting, because it would be another six years before it finally appeared at the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition in the summer of 1822. By that time the death of Joseph Farington in the previous year – killed falling down stairs in a church – had broken one of the last links with the original Academy, but nothing that Farington or anyone else had seen in its fifty-eight-year history could have rivalled the excitement or the crowds that turned up when David Wilkie’s painting was hung in the place of honour above the fireplace in the Academy’s main room.

  The duke had every reason to be pleased with the reception – he had paid the highest figure ever paid for a painting, counting the £12,000 out for Wilkie in notes (he did not want his bank to know what a fool he had been, he admitted) – and whether or not he quite knew what he had done, he and Wilkie had touched a public nerve. With the original commission Wellington’s idea had gone no farther than paying a tribute to the ordinary soldier, but between commission and exhibition a change had been made, and the notion of the ‘newspaper’ that Wilkie had tossed into the original conversation had germinated into a central icon that enshrined the whole raison d’être of his painting: ‘Chelsea Pensioners,’ it was titled, ‘Receiving the London Gazette Extraordinary of Thursday, June 22nd, 1815, Announcing the Battle of Waterloo!!!’

  The painting owes an unmistakable debt to Hogarth, and an even deeper one to the Dutch School of the seventeenth century, but in Chelsea Pensioners, Wilkie had done something new. The scene and the characters might belong to any genre painting but here genre and history meet, and the great events and the great heroes of the time – the proper subjects of Haydon’s High Art – are located not on the field of battle but in an England of Pensioners and soldiers, of Hussar and Lifeguard, of kilted Highlander and black drummer boy, of the old and young, women, children and babies and – crucially, the great democratising instrument of change – in the pages of a newspaper.

  Here in paint is the realisation of De Quincey’s hymn to the mail-coach, his ‘train of gunpowder … kindling at every instant new successions of burning joy … multiplying the victory itself … multiplying into infinity the stages of its progressive diffusion’, uniting the country in a single act of patriotic identification. In his earlier designs for the painting Wilkie had placed his reader to the left of the group seated at the table, but in the final version he is where he should be: at the heart of the scene, the pages of the Gazette in his hands picked out by a shaft of sunlight that divides it into dark and light in a kind of visual pun on the news of glory and death it carries.

  No two men could be less like each other than the feverish De Quincey and the ‘strange, tottering, feeble, pale’ cartoon-Scot of Haydon’s recollections, haggling over his prints and every last centime of change on their visit to France, and yet for both men war was the great unifying fact of national life. In his mind’s eye, De Quincey saw his Victory coach passing through the great and ancient cities of the country that were identified with Britain’s history, and in Chelsea Pensioners, Wilkie takes the trope a step further, with the deaf old man at the table and the baby held up in his father’s arms linking Britain’s past and future in a common heritage and a common national destiny.

  It was a brilliant painterly conceit and one that for a few brief weeks in the summer of 1815, at least, reflected a profound truth about the way that Britain had reacted to the news of Waterloo. ‘How can we be insensible to the distress of those, who to the very circumstances which have occasioned the public felicity, can trace their individual misfortunes?’ pleaded the vicar of Kirdford, invoking a sense of common responsibility that went ha
nd in hand with the ‘nation’ of Wilkie’s vision: ‘You, my Brethren, can rejoice; you can triumph; but do you not mark the poor mourner, who in the midst of these ebullitions of joy, sees all joy taken away from her for Ever! … Do you not see her, straining her children to her bosom, and herself all in tears bidding them weep no more – for though their Father is dead, he died to save his country … It is in our power to diffuse one ray of light into the Mansions of Sorrow … By our generosity to the Children, we can at least show the ardour of affectionate gratitude with which we cherish the memory of their fathers.’

  It was not just the churches either – even the ‘Fancy’ came up with their own charity fights at the Fives Court to raise money for the widows of Waterloo – but if Wilkie’s painting was not a fiction, one reason that people were so desperate to embrace it in 1822 was that seven years of unrest had rendered its ideal of a unified Britain little more than a memory. In the aftermath of the battle a medal – the Waterloo Medal – had for the first time been awarded to every soldier who had taken part in the campaign battles, and yet if you had come across those same veterans seven years later, you would have been just as likely to spot the distinctive crimson and blue ribbon of the medal on the breast of an old Waterloo man-turned-rioter like William Constive as on the soldiers of the 33rd of Foot formed up in square round the scaffold of a harmless Scottish weaver hanged and beheaded for treason.1

  In the years between Waterloo and Peterloo, in fact, the discipline and drilling of the professional soldier was evident in popular demonstrations from Glasgow to London, but the aura surrounding Waterloo and the ‘Waterloo Man’ was still real. It would not stop Highland soldiers returning to find their houses gone and landlords’ promises forgotten, but what it meant was that when Britain did finally emerge from the political and economic miseries of these years – when the generation that had learned its irremovable horror of change from the excesses of Robespierre and the French Terror had faded from public life – when the politicians whose names had inextricably yoked Waterloo and Peterloo together in the popular imagination had gone to their graves – Ellenborough in 1818; Castlereagh, cutting his own throat, in 1822; Liverpool in 1828 – when Britain had uncoupled itself from its autocratic partners to deliver Greece and South America their freedom – Waterloo, in all its potency, was still there as a powerful, unifying symbol of national achievement and the great foundation myth of nineteenth-century British imperial identity.