Went the Day Well?

by David Crane

  Respectability – the evangelicals’ gift to the nation – was in the air, settling like a November fog on the streets of London. The London that in 1815 had echoed to the shouts of Corn Law rioters and the smash of glass at the Chancery Lane house of Eliza Fenning’s employers had become the one city in Europe where Metternich could take refuge from the upheavals of 1848. The forces of conservatism in Britain had won and won so completely that more than a million people had lined the streets of the capital to pay homage to the man whose genius on the battlefield and stubborn resistance at home had done so much to thwart their political aspirations.

  And in the Athenaeum, Crabb Robinson, the disciple of William Godwin, finished his Thackeray. From the other side of the city, just as they had done to announce the victory at Waterloo, the guns of the Tower boomed out through the gloom to signal the end of Wellington’s obsequies. As the duke’s horse – boots reversed across the saddle – was brought back alone along the funeral route, old soldiers would be hovering around Siborne’s great model of Waterloo, on display in the Banqueting House opposite where Caroline Lamb had sat scribbling that night in Melbourne House. It was almost twenty-five years now since she had died there, half out of her mind. Her much-loved brother Frederick was dead too, though not before he had found himself at a dinner in Malta sitting next to the French officer who had saved his life with brandy while he was lying wounded on the field of Waterloo. Wheatley had married his Eliza Brooks – perhaps the cachet of Waterloo had made him seem more acceptable to her family – but he had also died. That engaging military Mr Collins, the Reverend Stonestreet, was still alive and full of clerical honours, but he was an exception. Thomas Chalmers had gone, taking down the Church of Scotland with him; and Frederick Maitland on board his ship the Wellesley; and William Wheeler; and Basil Hall, insane in the Haslar Hospital at Portsmouth, and his sister Magdalene, the plaything of an indifferent universe to the last. She had eventually married another friend of her brother’s, only to die in 1822.

  Salic Law and the accession of Queen Victoria had turned the Duke of Cumberland into the King of Hanover but he had been gone a year now, rumours and suspicions of murder and treason dogging him to the end. The world of Caolas Scalpaigh to which Eury MacLeod belonged had also disappeared as completely as she had herself – within ten years of Waterloo, economic ruin and emigration had seen to that – leaving for the island’s crofters only memories of broken promises and men who never returned. And Waterloo itself? ‘They have ruined my battlefield,’ Wellington had complained when he saw the giant memorial pyramid that had been raised out of what had once been the ridge that his army had defended for eight hours. But he need not have worried. It had always been more than a place. Each year on 18 June, deep into the 1890s, field marshals, generals and statesmen would come in their droves to the house of Lady de Ros, the Georgiana Lennox of Brussels fame, to pay their respects and bring their bouquets of flowers. And each year Lady de Ros, the young girl Wellington had taken in to the ball on the eve of Quatre Bras, would go in her carriage to Portland Square to take the old Earl of Albemarle – the junior ensign in Wellington’s army, George Keppel as he had once been – a sprig of laurel. Where Captain John Blackman had been buried, snowdrops would be coming out in the new year. In Belgian homes, cups would bear the grateful inscriptions of English parents indissolubly tied to this corner of a foreign field. In English houses branches of elm, carefully labelled, would carry the memory of ‘Wellington’s tree’ down the generations. In the Wyndham household they would sit in draughts because no Wyndham had closed a door since Hougoumont. In an ancient ruined church on the east coast of Scotland, open to the elements, a plaque would record the death of a Colonel William De Lancey. At Waterloo itself, Sergeant Cotton of the 8th Hussars, surrounded by his relics, would smile tolerantly at the idea that the French had ever threatened Mont-Saint-Jean. And at night, wrote Victor Hugo, when Cotton’s tourists and pilgrims had all left, ‘at night a sort of visionary mist rises from it, and the traveller who chooses to look and listen, dreaming like Virgil on the field of Philippi, may catch the echoes of catastrophe. That monumental hillock with its nondescript lion vanishes, and the fearful event comes back to life.’ The battlefield ‘recovers its reality, the lines of infantry wavering across the plain, the furious charges, the gleam of sabres and bayonets, the flame and thunder of cannon-fire. Like a groan emerging from the depths of a tomb the listener may hear the clamour of a ghostly conflict and see the shadowy forms of grenadiers and cuirassiers and the image of men departed – here Napoleon, there Wellington. All gone but still locked in combat, while the ditches run with blood, the trees shudder, the sound of fury rises over the sky and over those windblown heights – Mont-Saint-Jean, Hougoumont, Frischermont, Papelotte, Plancenoit – the spectral armies whirl in mutual extermination.’

  And, perhaps, amidst the chaos and violence of battle, and the ‘Ha! Ha!’ of William Verner’s Constantia, spooked to the end of her long life by the sound of gunfire or smell of powder, the voice of a British soldier – the accent cockney, or Irish brogue, the Highlands, the north of England, the West Country, Knightsbridge?

  Were you at Waterloo?

  I have been at Waterloo,

  ’Tis no matter what you do.

  If you have been at Waterloo.

  Notes on the Text

  The Tiger is Out

  1. ‘All the town was out to see them’: It was not just French prisoners who were returning home. ‘One of my father’s amphibious crofters disappeared,’ the son of Sir Hector Mackenzie of Gairloch, on the west coast of Scotland, remembered, ‘leaving his wife and family to the care of Providence, without a clue to his being dead or alive, for some five years. One day my father, superintending some job near the bay, noticed a man coming towards him with a true sailor-like roll. Intimate with the cut of every man on the estate, says he, “Surely that is dead Donald McLean’s walk;” and, on coming near, it certainly was Donald himself, in naval attire. “Halloa, Donald!” says he, “where on earth are you from?” speaking, as he always did to his people, in Gaelic. Donald pulled up, and saluting, replied in two words, also in Gaelic, “Bho Iutharn,” the English of which is simply “From hell.” … Donald had been grabbed by a press-gang, had survived five years of it, and found his widow and children glad to see him again’ (J. H. Dixon, Gairloch and Guide to Loch Maree, 1886, Fort William, pp. 984, 9112–3). Since the Peace of Amiens there had also been soldiers, sailors and civilians held in France, some for ten years or more. ‘Charles Scott, a seaman in His Majesty’s Ship under my command,’ Captain Frederick Maitland of the Bellerophon informed the Admiralty, ‘having applied to be paid for HM Ship Lidd, and for the period he was Prisoner in France, from the year 1804 to 1814, is informed he is suspected to have served in Arms against his country, and therefore cannot be paid till he brings Proof to the contrary. There are now on board the ship two men … who knew him in Valenciennes Prison from the year 1805 to the year 1809, when he attempted to make his escape, and are ready to make oath, that they afterwards saw his name in a hand bill as being condemned to slavery for having made the said attempt; Scott further states that he was condemned to 5 years slavery, four of which he served in L’Orient Dockyard in chains, as a convict, and was released at the Peace’ (Adm 1./2179/239).

  3 a.m.: A Dying World

  1. And beside the track: If there is something about the history of ‘Aurora MacLeod’ and her child, something about its hopelessness, that seems to encapsulate the fate of the doomed island communities, it was not the whole story. In many ways the pattern of abandonment, displacement, ignorance and economic despair might seem to say it all, but the truth of the Gaelic tragedy lies as much in its brutality and violence as in its sadness, and in the peat-brown depths of a deserted lochan at the northern end of the island, the mouldering remains of another child could have told another story. The child – it was never known, or at least never recorded, whether it was a boy or a girl – had been born to a twen
ty-three-year-old servant girl called Elizabeth MacIver in the house of the customs officer for Stornoway. She had come to work for Mr Syme Tod and his wife the previous Martinmas, and although there had been gossip about her from the start, had given perfect satisfaction until on the morning of the 16 March – just as news of Bonaparte’s escape from Elba was reaching Scotland – her empty bed and bedding were found stained with blood and Elizabeth MacIver gone. The other servants in the house had suspected she was pregnant from the day she arrived, but she had always denied it, and when she was found at her sister’s and brought up before the Sheriff Substitute, Elizabeth MacIver held to her story. She had gone to her sister’s with nothing but a bad back, she insisted, but when the next day she was dismissed from her service and questioned again, she finally admitted to a ‘carnal connexion’ the previous June and July with the Stornoway schoolmaster John Fraser. ‘Now moved by a just sense of deep contrition for the heinous crime recently committed,’ she confessed, ‘that on the evening of Wednesday last … she was privately delivered of a still-born child in the House of Mr Syme Tod and concealed it there in a box’ in the kitchen. She had gone to her sister’s that night, and a few days later had returned to the Tods’ house after dark to retrieve the body, and thrown it into the sea ‘near the Castle of Stornoway’, before returning to her sister’s. She would have known perfectly well that concealment of a pregnancy was a crime in itself, but over the next weeks – battered down by repeated questioning, haunted by the image of her dead child, driven to a final self-destructive anger against a world that had pinned her down, it is impossible to know which – she made one last statement. ‘In the presence of John Mackenzie Esq. Sheriff Substitute of Lewis,’ the English transcript reads, ‘on being further examined and Interrogated [she] Declares that on the Evening of Wednesday the Fifteenth day of March last, she was privately Delivered of a full time child … that finding the child was in life she strangled it by putting a string or cord around its Neck … [and] proceeded to a Pond between two Dykes near Brayhead, and threw it therein.’ The harsh, Calvinist world of the Kirk had borne its predictable fruit. Despair and violence – the two poles of the nineteenth-century Highland experience – were there together in the dock and it was not just liberal lawyers who saw in the fate of Eury MacLeod and Elizabeth MacIver more than just personal tragedies. Was it any wonder, Scottish judges on the Northern circuit speculated, that the incidence of concealment and infanticide seemed at their highest where the law of the Kirk was at its sternest? It seemed to the Lord Justice Clerk – no enemy to Tory values – that a little more charity from ministers might mean a little less crime, but over these next decades charity – from Kirk or landlord – would not be a quality in rich supply in the Scottish Highlands.

  3 p.m.: The Walking Dead

  1. The blaspheming rapist William Oldfield: A different system operated in the provinces, where the royal prerogative had effectively been delegated away, but for Old Bailey cases the royal ‘fount of mercy’ still flowed from the king or Regent. At the end of every assize the Recorder for London would draw up a list of prisoners sentenced to death, which he would then take in person to the prince and his Cabinet advisors for confirmation or commutation. For all the rich constitutional and symbolic trappings that hung around the prerogative, though, the result was a lottery – one man might hang because the government needed five for a decent show, or be reprieved because eight on the same gallows could seem too bloody – and no one could know what would happen when the sentimental, indolent ‘Prinny’ woke from his doze to exercise his right to mercy. ‘I was standing close to [the king] at the Council,’ the diarist and courtier Charles Greville recalled one such meeting of George and his senior ministers, convened to decide which names were to be ‘ticked off’ for execution, ‘and he put down his head and whispered, “Which are you for Cadland [the previous year’s Derby winner] or the mare?” [meaning between Cadland and Bess of Bedlam] so I put my head down too and said “The horse!” and then as we retired he said to the Duke, “A little bit of Newmarket”’ (Gatrell, p. 552).

  The Days That Are Gone

  1. Her naval brother Basil: Basil Hall’s story is a particularly cruel example of the way in which people learned of Waterloo. He was returning on his ship from India when they fell in at the entrance to the Channel with another man o’ war, and a ‘precious copy’ of the Gazette containing Wellington’s despatch gave them their first news of the battle. ‘Within five minutes after landing at Portsmouth,’ Hall remembered, ‘I met a near relation of my own. This seemed a fortunate rencontre, for I had not received a letter from home for nearly a year – and eagerly asked him, “What news of old friends?” “I suppose,” he said, “you know of your sister’s marriage?” “No, indeed! I do not! – which sister?” He told me. “But to whom is she married?” I cried out with intense impatience, wondering greatly that he had not told me this at once. “Sir William De Lancey was the person,” he answered. But he spoke not in the joyous tone that befits such communications. “God bless me!” I exclaimed. “I am delighted to hear that … I see by the despatch, giving an account of the late victory, that he was badly wounded – how is he now? I observe by the postscript to the Duke’s letter that strong hopes are entertained of his recovery.” “Yes,” said my friend, “that was reported, but could hardly have been believed. Sir William was mortally wounded, and lived not quite a week after the action”’ (De L, p. 30).

  2. the theatricals of Byron: On the morning after the arrival of the Waterloo despatch, George Ticknor had paid his first call on the Byrons in Piccadilly, and while he was there, talking of America, ‘English Bards’, Walter Scott and Byron’s old family quarrel with Lord Carlisle – Major Frederick Howard’s father – Sir James Bland Burgess had burst into the room ‘and said abruptly, “My lord, my lord, a great battle has been fought in the Low Countries, and Bonaparte is entirely defeated.” “But is it true?” said Byron, – “is it true?” “Yes, my lord, it is certainly true; an aide-de-camp arrived in town last night; he has been in Downing Street this morning, and I have just seen him as he was going to Lady Wellington’s. He says he thinks Bonaparte is in full retreat towards Paris.” After an instant’s pause, Lord Byron replied, “I am d—d sorry for it,” and then, after another slight pause, he added, “I didn’t know but I might live to see Lord Castlereagh’s head on a pole. But I suppose I sha’n’t now.” And this was the first impression produced on his impetuous nature by the news of the Battle of Waterloo’ (Ticknor, p. 60).

  New Battle Lines

  1. ‘The most ridiculous and most characteristic thing’: In such a climate it was unlikely that the inimitable George Stonestreet would not be feathering his clerical nest, but even that was fraught with difficulties. ‘I was dining yesterday with Gen Howard and was sitting as his Vice over a turkey,’ he reported to George Trower, and was in the middle of carving the bird, and particularly looking forward to his share, when an aide-de-camp rushed in, saluted nobody, and told him that he had to come immediately – would brook no argument – would allow no delay for the turkey and give no explanation other than that ‘My General and Lady Sarah Lennox’, the Duke of Richmond’s daughter, were waiting outside for him. Even Stonestreet could see that there was nothing to be done, and with one last reluctant glance at the turkey, followed the aide and, climbing into a fiacre, found himself with Sir Peregrine Maitland of Waterloo fame and a sobbing Lady Sarah Lennox. ‘“Here we are,” said the General, “We have just run away from the Dukes – we shall be pursued – will you marry us instantly” … “What I said (to myself), steal a young lady out of a Duke’s family – the ex-Viceroy of Ireland – the friend of Wellington – the offender too a good staid widower of near 40 – this is a terrible piece of larceny – I too am to be an accomplice” … all this you know was “aside”, for it was not pretty to tell him what term belongs to gentlemen and what term too, to ladies – who do these sort of things.’ It was an exquisite problem – he could not afford to
offend his general, he could still less afford to offend a brace of dukes, and then there was always the possibility of a little piece of ‘portable property’ in the shape of candlesticks or a bit of plate to think of – but perhaps most important of all there was still that turkey waiting. Maitland had told him that the only way of avoiding bloodshed was to marry them straight away – ‘he could refuse the duke’s challenge as a son-in-law but not otherwise’ – but even with that to factor in, caution got the better part of clerical valour, and giving them the name and address of another chaplain who might be more biddable or braver, saw the runaways off and returned to the dinner table. ‘But the turkey was gone! Cheese, dear, tasteful repast to a ploughman or cricketer, but too vulgar and mortifying, and I reserved my disappointment for ample revenge on the dessert.’ The Reverend Stonestreet was not out of the woods yet, however, and the next day Maitland was back to say that the chaplain had disappeared, that no French priest or notary could be found, and that Stonestreet would have to apply to Wellington for a special licence for them. For understandable reasons he was not eager to do this, but an order was an order, and braving the duke’s ‘overbearing stare’ and abrupt questioning – ‘I stand bullying very well,’ he proudly told Trower – at last succeeded in getting Maitland the licence he wanted. ‘It turned out the luckiest thing in the world – that he [Stonestreet] had made so many difficulties,’ he later reported, because it gave everyone time to cool down. ‘Four days after the wedding the Bride return’d to the world; made her debut at a grand family dinner, all branches delighted … I think I drew my head very well out of the scrape. For however powerfully interest work’d to get their pardon, I think I should never have had mine’ (BL Add Mss 61805 ff).