Witnessing Waterloo: 24 Hours, 48 Lives, A World Forever Changed. David Crane

and again that De Lancey would be safe – she had kept her word not to listen to any rumours, she had kept her side of the bargain – and exactly on the stroke of midnight, as the Sunday of 18 June dawned and the rain lashed against her window, she had her reward. It was only a few hurried lines that her husband had sent, written at Genappe on the Charleroi road south of Brussels. There had been a battle, fought on the 16th, he told her, and ‘he was safe, and in great spirits’; ‘they had given the French a tremendous beating’. Whether, though, Quatre Bras was to be the final battle, William De Lancey did not say. In Belgium the day of Waterloo had begun.

1 a.m.

      Cut

      It was raining in London too as a man in his early thirties, unshaved and wild looking, stumbled out through the wicket gate at the top of Inner Temple Lane, and turned down Fleet Street into the Strand.

      William Hazlitt was drunk and had every intention of staying drunk for as long as he could. For the best part of a year he had had to live with the humiliation of his hero Bonaparte, and he was not the man to sacrifice his moment of angry triumph now that the people’s time had come and the ‘Child Roland of the Revolution’ – ‘the Colossus of the age’, the ‘prostrate might and majesty of man’, as he saluted Bonaparte – had ‘risen from the dead’ to scatter the Bourbon ‘spiders and toads’ from beneath his giant shadow.

      There was an astonishing violence about Hazlitt’s anger – the violence of the boxing ring that he so much loved, the violence of a man jabbing and jabbing his opponent to a bloody pulp – that was part a matter of principle and part personality. There was no political writer in Regency England who was so honest in his hatred of tyranny, but in Hazlitt everything that was best and worst were inextricably mixed, the strong stems of English libertarianism hopelessly entangled with the weeds of anti-popery, the fine intelligence mired in an abject and humiliating sensuality, the blazing hatred of injustice rooted in an innately suspicious, misanthropic character that was as slow to forgive a kindness as it was a slight.

      Even at the best of times Hazlitt’s was a face you could watch for a month and not see smile – the lined, wary face of a man who expected to be dunned or robbed at every moment, the face of Caius Cassius who ‘quite saw through the deeds of men’ – and he had not had the best of evenings. It had been a long time since he and Charles Lamb had seen the world through the same eyes, and yet even now if there was one place where Hazlitt might hope to be welcome, where his anger might be dissolved in the alcoholic haze of his host’s good nature – one place, in his mind, where the only sensible woman in all London was to be found – it was at the Lambs’ chambers in Hare Court.

      He could hardly have been surprised that old James Burney had turned his back on him after the mauling he had given his sister Fanny’s novel in the Edinburgh, but what business a prosing turncoat like Robinson had cutting him was another matter. Hazlitt did not need lecturing on Wordsworth by anyone, and was there anything he had said in The Examiner that was not true? Would the ‘patriot’ Milton have written ‘paltry sonnets’ upon the ‘royal fortitude’ of the old mad king? Would Milton have suppressed his early anti-war poems to spare the sensibilities of a blood-besotted nation? Would Milton – to whom Wordsworth, ‘the God of his own idolatry’, so liked to compare himself – have traded in every principle of his youth to become a Tory Government’s Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland?

      Hazlitt hated the Tories and their placemen and their pensioners, hated the hired pens of the government-controlled press, hated the mental servitude into which the nation had sold itself, and above all he hated the renegade liberal with a violence that had all the bitterness of the disappointed acolyte behind it. It was absurd to expect anything more of some shuffling, tuft-hunter of a lawyer like Robinson, but it sickened him that the men who had taught the ‘dumb, inarticulate … lifeless’ child that he had once been to think and feel, the men who had once hailed the new dawn of freedom in France, were these same ‘Jacobin renegados’ – Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey – who now filled the niches of Robinson’s pantheon.

      He told himself he had ‘done’ with them, but he was fooling himself – he could no more have done without them than he could have done without oxygen – and the memory of what they had meant to him and the world their poetry had opened up only made their apostasy the more intolerable. Hazlitt had been scarcely more than a boy when he had first met Coleridge, but he could never forget the day he had got up in the dark to walk the ten miles to Shrewsbury to hear him preach ‘Upon Peace and War’, the sound of his voice rising from a plain Unitarian pulpit ‘like a stream of rich distilled perfume’. It was, he remembered, as if poetry and philosophy had met, ‘Truth and Genius had embraced’ and a young man had heard the ‘music of the spheres’. After seventeen years he could still recall the text, the ‘Siren’s song’ of the voice, the ‘strange wildness in his look’ as if it had been yesterday: ‘He talked of those who had “inscribed the cross of Christ on banners dripping with human gore”.’ He showed ‘the fatal effects of war, drew a striking contrast between the simple shepherd boy, driving his team afield, or sitting under the hawthorn, piping to his flock, “as though he never should be old”, and the same poor country lad, crimped, kidnapped, brought into town, made drunk in an ale house, turned into a wretched drummer boy, with his hair sticking on end with powder and pomatum, a long cue at his back, and tricked out in the lonesome finery of the profession of blood.’

      There was not a thought or feeling he had ever had, Charles Lamb would say, that he did not owe to Coleridge, and for the son of an obscure dissenting minister of Irish origins, cribb’d and cabin’d in a remote Shropshire village, that day had come with all the force and absoluteness of an evangelical conversion. Hazlitt had grown up in the fine, rational Republican Unitarian tradition that boasted Milton and Priestley as its torch-bearers, but here for the first time in a Shrewsbury pulpit were truths and a language that his dry, difficult and honourable father, ‘poring from morn to night’ over his Bible and Commentaries in the internal exile of Wem, could never teach him. ‘I had no notion then that I should ever be able to express my admiration to others in motley imagery or quaint allusion, ’till the light of his genius shone into my soul, like the sun’s rays glittering in the puddles of the road … that my understanding did not remain dumb and brutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe to Coleridge.’

      Hazlitt had honoured that debt in private and in public with the great hammer blows of his prose and if honouring it now meant going into the ring with the men who sold out to the old Tory idols of God and King and Law, then he was ready. For more than two hundred years his England had defined itself as a nation by its opposition to Popish tyranny, and there could be no truce now with an English government and its hireling army bent on restoring a malignant Bourbon tyrant to ‘pollute the air’ and squat, toad-like, on ‘the corpse of human liberty’. There was only one issue for Hazlitt: did the people belong, like cattle, to a family, or were they free? Beside that all else was irrelevant.

      The Tory press branded him a Jacobin. It was a title he was proud of. To be a true Englishman now, to stand in the great tradition that stretched back through the political martyrs of the 1790s and down the long line of Whig history to Milton, the Commonwealth and the Reformation, was to be a Jacobin, and ‘to be a true Jacobin,’ – Hazlitt’s battle cry had never rung clearer or more urgently – ‘a man must be a good hater’. ‘The true Jacobin hates the enemies of liberty, as they hate liberty, with all his strength and with all his might, and with all his heart and with all his soul … He never forgets or forgives an injury done to the people, for tyrants never forget or forgive one done to themselves … He makes neither peace nor truce with them. His hatred of wrong only ceases with the wrong. The sense of it, and of the barefaced assumption of the right to inflict it, deprives him of his rest. It stagnates in his blood. It loads his heart with aspics’ tongues, deadly to small pens. It settles in his brain – it puts him beside himself. Who will not feel all this for a girl, a toy, a turn of the dice, a word, a blow, for anything relating to himself; and will not