Went the Day Well?

by David Crane

  There is an uncomfortable truth here, and it is a truth that, for all the Gallic hyperbole, goes to the heart of that central paradox of the Age of Waterloo. War is not just a fundamental instrument of evolutionary change but of social and political development as well, and when the First World War could deliver the vote to Britain’s women and the Second World War the Welfare State, how was it that a war that had mobilised the energies of a whole nation for more than twenty years could end up with the great mass of people who had fought it in a worse state, politically, than they had been in 1792?

  It does not dispose of the puzzle to say that Catholic emancipation came in 1829 or the Great Reform Act in 1832 – all the reforms, from Robert Peel’s rationalisation of the penal code to the extension of the franchise to the middle classes were designed to strengthen the system not weaken it – and it is not as though in 1815 there were not the men available to bring about something more than a slow and grudging change. Not since the end of the Roman Empire had Europe been awash with so many tens of thousands of disbanded soldiers schooled in violence, and yet in a hungry and politically oppressed Britain, crying out for redress and filled with a vast reservoir of disgruntled soldiers and seamen equipped with all the habits of discipline and organisation required for armed protest, how, again, was it that nothing, essentially, happened?

  There is an almost endless checklist of reasons why Britain escaped revolution in these post-war years – working-class dependence on its middle-class leadership, internal rivalries and jealousies, a revulsion of moderate opinion from extreme radicalism after the Cato Street Conspiracy, Methodism, organisational failures, Bentham, an innate habit of deference, an improving economy, rising employment, increasing wealth – and to all that must be added the ‘anaesthetic’ of victory. The role of the abolitionists in bolstering the self-esteem of a population only better off than the slaves they pitied has been eloquently argued, and yet if there was one intangible above that which could reconcile the dispossessed to their fate, one balm for hurt minds or palliative to soothe the degradation of a population cut off from the fruits of Waterloo it was the reflected glory and consolation of their Britishness.

  In that at least, if in nothing else, the haves and have-nots of the post-Waterloo decades shared something in common, because after twenty years of war, self-interest, fear, suspicion, political principle – or an uninvestigated combination of all four – had left a great swathe of Britain resolutely content with what they had and were. Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the Peterloo Massacre was that the worst of the violence was the work of the local yeomanry and not the regular army, and for the ‘manufacturers, merchants, publicans, and shopkeepers on horseback’ who trampled and hacked their way through the crowds of women and children – for the clerical magistrates who promised every ‘downright blackguard reformer’ the rope – for the justices who committed the victims and not the murderers to trial – for yeoman farmers and Tory historians like Robert Southey, who reverenced Britain’s incomparable constitution and her Established Church as the bulwarks of the ‘common weal’ – for Anglican apologists such as George Stonestreet who saw a traitor under every Catholic bed – for all that conservative, patriotic Britain, in love with its own myths, confirmed in every prejudice and every assumption of superiority by victory over Revolutionary and Napoleonic France – the Britain they had was the Britain they wanted.

  They loved what Britain had achieved, they loved beating Boney, they loved the stories of Belgians running away, they loved their Lifeguardsman Shaw just as they would love their Lord Palmerston, and above all they loved what Waterloo told them about themselves.6 ‘The doctrine of God’s unlimited, particular Providence, in the support, Government, and direction of all things without exception, makes an Eminent Branch of the Christian system,’ began one victory sermon in 1815; ‘but let me direct your thoughts, or rather let me follow them, whither in all probability they have preceded me, to Waterloo – The Spot of Land no doubt designed by Almighty God, for the total defeat and overthrow of our most Inveterate Enemy … Yes, my brethren, God hath arisen and displayed his Omnipotence. And in his great Mercy hath crowned The Christian Banners with Victory and Renown. The Power of God and his faithful servants hath triumphed gloriously … It is God, who disposes of the Interests of Nations, and in so doing serves his own great designs in the government of the universe.’

  There has seldom been a war on which God has not been on one side or the other, and usually on both, but the sense of manifest destiny that took hold of Britain in the wake of Waterloo is of a different order. A profoundly Protestant sense of ‘election’ had been lodged deep in the English psyche for centuries, and Waterloo came as the ultimate confirmation of that belief, the triumphant demonstration not just of Britain and her Empire’s special place in God’s unfolding purpose but of the fact that nineteenth-century Britain was worthy of that place.

  The triumph of the abolitionists, the establishment of the Bible Society, the universal diffusion of Christian education – ‘such are the acts which have conciliated our God,’ declared the Sheffield Iris, ‘such are the arms with which we have conquered our enemies’ and it was the ‘Arm of the Lord of Hosts’ that had sustained them ‘through this mighty contest’. Not even ‘the meanest peasant was so much below the grandeur and the sorrow of the times’, wrote Thomas De Quincey of Britain’s war with Bonaparte, ‘as to confound these battles, which were gradually moulding the destinies of Christendom, with the vulgar conflicts of ordinary warfare, which are oftentimes but gladiatorial trials of national prowess. The victories of England in this stupendous conflict rose of themselves as natural Te Deums to heaven.’

  It was a neatly circular argument – Britain had triumphed because she had performed God’s work and been granted victory in order that she could carry her mission across the globe – and the seventy-two separate campaigns fought by Queen Victoria’s armies underlines how willingly Britain took up the challenge. Forty years after Waterloo God-fearing, evangelical young officers would see war in the Crimea as a portent of Christ’s Second Coming, and in poems, letters and sermons, history and destiny link hands in a theme that shades from the crassest philistinism and xenophobic disdain at one end of the spectrum to the most ecstatic visions of Thomas De Quincey at the other.

  And it is De Quincey, finally – bizarrely – the opium-addicted child of Romanticism, whose youth was set against the backdrop of war and the mail-coach, and whose last years were lived out in the age of industrialisation, steam and the train – who has left the most extraordinary testament to the place of Waterloo in the psyche of the British people. As an old man he would look back to those war years and think of a young woman who, each morning, as dawn broke and the Bath Mail burst out of the gloom of the Marlborough forest, would be waiting at the roadside to pick up her customers’ commissions.

  Over the years ‘Sweet Fanny of the Bath road’, standing in all her steadfast beauty and innocence ‘among the roses and dewy thickets and roe-deer’, had become for him the symbol of the Britain that fought that June of 1815. In his dreams he would see her assailed by the monsters of Napoleonic tyranny, until somewhere in the depths of his mind she merged with the nightmare memory of another girl who he had seen nearly crushed to death by a mail-coach. ‘Immediately, in a trance,’ he wrote thirty-seven years after the incident – thirty-seven years in which that young woman’s image, frozen for a moment in the moonlight, ‘fainting, praying, raving, despairing’ had haunted his dreams – years in which he had followed her on Coleridgean ghost-ships across oceans and over quicksands in desperate attempts to save her from her fate, ‘I was carried over land and sea to some distant kingdom, and placed upon a triumphal car amongst companions crowned with laurels … Tidings had arrived, within an hour, of a grandeur that measured itself against centuries’, a grandeur ‘too full of pathos, too full of joy that acknowledged no fountain but God’ to express itself in any other language than that of tears and hymns of praise an
d gratitude.

  ‘The tidings’, the ‘sacred word’, was Waterloo, and for two hours the Victory coach thunders into the night carrying with it the news of Europe’s redemption – through ‘a mighty minster forty leagues long and reaching into the clouds – past chantry chapels and hymning white-robed choirs – through a soaring, purple marbled necropolis of terraces and towers – between bas-reliefs of battles and sarcophagi that hold the noble dust of Crécy and Trafalgar’s heroes – league after tireless league until, suddenly, out of the mist, an infant girl stands helpless in the mad careering path of their horses. “Oh baby!” I exclaimed, “shalt thou be the ransom for Waterloo? Must we, that carry tidings of great joy to every people, be messengers of ruin to thee?”’

  As De Quincey rises to his feet in horror, a trumpet sounds from the stony lips of a ‘Dying Trumpeter’ woken into life and the infant child – the price of Victory – the price England has paid for redeeming Europe – Christian England herself – is whisked away from under their horses’ hoofs, to reappear again, grown now into womanhood, high aloft in the vast recesses of the cathedral, her face bathed in the crimson hues of stained-glass windows and the martyred blood of England’s warriors, while the dead of Crécy and Trafalgar and a hundred English battles unite with the living in one tumultuous song of praise. And ‘I heard a voice from heaven, which said, ‘“Let there be no more fear, and no more sudden death! Cover them with joy as the tides cover the shore!” … As brothers we moved together; to the skies we rose – to the dawn that advanced – to the stars that fled: rendering thanks to God in the highest – that, having hid his face through one generation behind thick clouds of war, once again was ascending – was ascending from Waterloo – in the visions of peace.’

  Never could Revelations, opium, gothic Romanticism, genius, vision, dream, fear, illness, submerged memory and the fractured pieces of a lifetime’s learning come together to produce something so completely central to the way that ordinary men and women saw the world. Victor Hugo would certainly not have liked its message, or England made head or tail of what on earth De Quincey was on about, but behind all the extraordinary flights of imagination – the stony trumpeter, the Campo Santo of the nation’s dead, the transformation of an English country lane into the fan-vaulting of his mighty cathedral, a chance moment of horror into a whole, swelling fugue – here, at the bottom of it all, stripped of its pageantry and the strange private symbolism of a young girl who is one moment Fanny, another De Quincey’s dead sister and another the young woman of his moonlit nightmare, are the prosaic, Protestant patriotic, beliefs of the average nineteenth-century Englishman in the divinely sanctioned destiny of England.

  It is a strange thought that only a vial of opium separates De Quincey from the world of Gilbert and Sullivan, but there was nothing in his or Haydon’s vision of British greatness that would have discomfited the vast crowd of over a million who gathered on a raw November day in 1852 for the funeral of the Iron Duke. ‘What makes the difference between the obsequies of the Duke of Wellington and of any other great men?’ The Times asked: ‘Grief, of course, in the usual sense of the term, is out of the question … but sentiments sublimer far than sorrow are awakened by such spectacles as that of yesterday. Through the countless thousands then gathered along the streets of London ran the strong currents of feeling and of thought which go to form the spirit of a nation … When the independence of England and the world was assailed Providence sent us a champion, and as the myriads of his countrymen yesterday watched with deepest interest the transit of his body to the tomb, many a heartfelt prayer must have been uttered that, should … this land of freedom be once more threatened, God may grant us another Wellesley to lead our armies and win our battles.’

  ‘Ahmedugger, Assaye, Argaum, Gavilghur, Roleia, Vimiera, Douro and Oporto, Talavera, Busaco, TorresVedras, Fuentes d’Onor, Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajos, Salamanca, Vittoria, Pampeluna, Pyrenees, St Sebastian, Nivelle, Nives, Orthes, Toulouse, Quatre Bras, Waterloo’ – the battle honours adorning the hideous, eighteen-ton, bronze funeral carriage could leave no doubt of what was being honoured here, or on what the greatness of the greatest imperial city the world had ever seen rested. Thirty-seven years before, the Sheffield Iris had invoked the ‘Lord of Hosts’ in Britain’s civilising mission, and as regiment after regiment who had fought under the duke at Waterloo and through India, Spain, France and Belgium, filed between the packed and black-draped stands, who could have doubted that the Lord of Hosts was still with them or that Britain had manifestly honoured its covenant with its God?

  A world empire, the abolition of slavery, the spread of the Gospel, a navy that scoured the seas to uphold its writ, an army whose triumphs on the field of Waterloo had given Europe nearly forty years of peace, who could doubt it? ‘There’ was the sombre green of the Rifles, The Times noted; there the 33rd; there the 17th Lancers and the 13th Light Dragoons, there the 8th Hussars, the Scots Greys, the Blues and the Life Guards, there the one-armed Raglan and there, ‘most wondrous of all, with bald, uncovered head, apparently unconscious of the fact that age stands exposure to cold less successfully than youth’, the Marquis of Anglesey, Uxbridge as was. This was a nation celebrating itself and the military cornerstone of its greatness and prosperity. In the cities of Gloucester, Birmingham and Carlisle the Quakers might keep their shops open in protest at ‘the wickedness’ of commemorating a life of killing, but if anyone else was harbouring their doubts and remembering the human and political cost of that triumph – if any of his Irish troops marching with the great funeral car recalled how late and reluctantly he had come to Catholic emancipation – or any minds went back to the days of ‘Captain Swing’ or the night the reform mobs smashed the windows of Apsley House and the duke’s words to Mrs Arbuthnot – ‘The People are rotten, rotten to the core’ – then this was not the day to acknowledge them.

  It would have been strange if it had been any different, because the men and women at his funeral were not just celebrating an individual, they were celebrating themselves. In the modern theory of political life the rationale of the state lies in the service of its people, but the Britain that had triumphed at Waterloo was not a ‘nation state’ in that modern sense but its evolutionary antecedent in which the energies and talents of the whole people – from Wellington to Wheeler, from the Whig grandees gathered at Arundel to celebrate the 600th anniversary of Magna Carta to the crowd clustering around the Waterloo despatch in David Wilkie’s painting – were there to serve the state.

  It had been a brilliant system for fighting a war – for two decades it had harnessed the will, resources and taxes of a whole nation – and in peace it had been a soothing panacea. Thirty-odd years after the Peterloo Massacre, the children and grandchildren of the men and women killed that day seemed no nearer winning their political rights than they had been in 1819, but the Britain to which they belonged had never been greater and in the celebration of the man whose victory at Waterloo had laid the foundation of that greatness – the chapter and verse of all that they understood by the term ‘British’ – they saw their apotheosis and not their servitude.

  It was a dangerous illusion. The duke had dedicated himself so completely to the state, on the battlefield and in Cabinet as minister and prime minister, had been such a towering figure in the life of the nation, that by some strange inversion he had become that state. As surely as Bonaparte had been the imaginative embodiment of Revolutionary France, the Iron Duke had become the incarnation of the Britain whose inflexible determination had defeated Bonaparte. He was not, though; he was just its greatest and most blinkered servant. ‘What would the duke have done?’ his old subordinates used to ask themselves, and only too soon Britain would have its chance to find out what it would do without him.

  That, though, lay in the future. Hazlitt could have told them, but Hazlitt was long gone, and as the November evening closed in, and the crowds drifted away, it was perhaps fitting that it was one of the classic trimmers of his age who was
left among his ghosts beside the library fire of the Athenaeum. As a young man, Henry Crabb Robinson had run through the streets of Colchester shouting out the news of the collapse of Pitt’s treason trials, and as he sat there now, full of years and respectability, reading Thackeray in the club he had helped found, did his mind go back to a night thirty-seven years earlier, when he had climbed the stairs of the Lambs’ house in Inner Temple Lane and ‘cut’ Hazlitt?

  It was half a lifetime ago and a lost world. ‘Where are they gone, the old familiar faces?’ Lamb had asked over half a century before, alone with his own childhood ghosts. ‘All, all gone the old familiar faces’, and now Lamb himself was with them. He had died in 1834 and poor, insane Mary thirteen years later, and one by one they had dropped away – the young Charles Lloyd in his straitjacket, Basil Montagu just last year – until only a handful of them were left, so respectable that if they had passed their younger selves in Hare Court they would scarcely have known each other.

  The young, defiantly Byronic Benjamin Disraeli, whose father Isaac had been at Murray’s with George Ticknor on the day of Waterloo, might regret the days when disinherited sons would race their father’s horses at Newmarket and steal their fathers’ mistresses, but Crabb Robinson’s journey was the journey of the age. Oswald Leicester, who had founded the first Methodist Sunday school at Altrincham, had died a Church of England priest. Francis Place, the 1790s radical who was the foreman at the Duke of Cumberland inquest, lived to be a constable at the Chartists’ marches. John Cam Hobhouse, the Westminster firebrand sent to Newgate in 1819, was now the first Baron Broughton. The Countess of Rosebery – execrated as a harlot in both Houses of Parliament – would become the grandmother of a British prime minister. Thomas Cochrane, one-time scourge of the Establishment, honours and rank restored, would end in Westminster Abbey; and Byron – even the dead were not exempt the Victorian airbrush – would metamorphose from the pariah of English society, forced into exile in 1816 on the scandalous collapse of his marriage, into the idealised champion of Greek freedom.