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

used to that. ‘Hating,’ he acknowledged with a haughty, Miltonic defiance, was ‘the most thankless of all tasks’. He had not heard Mary Lamb’s parting remark to Robinson – Robinson was lucky, she had murmured to him, that he had so many friends that he could afford to cut them – but it would have come as no surprise to Hazlitt. Solitude was the price of truth and he was ready to pay it. No defender of ‘the people’ expected so little of that ‘toad-eating creature man’; no champion of liberty felt so little affinity with his political allies; no husband ever had less sympathy from the wife who walked home silent at his side. Lamb, at Hazlitt’s wedding, had had trouble stopping himself giggling, but there had not been much cause for giggling since. His heart, ‘shut up in the prison house’ of ‘rude clay’, had never found ‘a heart to speak to’ and in his lonely, angry pride he knew it never would. His soul, too, might remain ‘in its original bondage’ but that understanding – the power of words – that Coleridge had unlocked in the dumb angry child of dissent was still his and he would still use it. Ten years before, when news came of Bonaparte’s victory at Austerlitz, he had walked out into a Shropshire night and watched the evening star set over a poor man’s cottage with a sense that here was a new Bethlehem and a new era being born. Now, somewhere in Belgium, that star was about to rise again.

      As they reached the top of Queen’s Street, Hazlitt and his wife turned off from St James’s Park, and right again into York Street. They were home. It was a house he rented from the dry, mechanical, utilitarian Bentham, but the garden had once been Milton’s and the home of English liberty. And so long as Hazlitt lived there it would be still.

2 a.m.

      Dance of Death

      In these early hours of Sunday morning a woman in her late twenties called Charlotte Waldie sat alone in her room in Antwerp’s Laboureur Inn. Her brother and sister had long since gone to bed, but even after two sleepless nights Charlotte had no intention of missing out on anything. As the rain lashed against the window panes and the thunder rolled in the distance she sat listening to the ‘dismal sound’ of a coffin lid being nailed down in a room below and waited for the inn to fall quiet.

      Charlotte Waldie had been born of a Scottish father and an English mother on the family estate by the Tweed River, near the ancient abbey town of Kelso. In her later accounts of these days in Belgium she would always sign herself ‘An Englishwoman’, but underneath that rather cool description was a child of the turbulent Scottish Borders, a glowing patriot of the school of Walter Scott with an inexhaustible appetite for experience, a gift for prose of a breathless, heady kind, a travel writer’s eye for detail and an unashamed habit of seeing the whole world as copy for her pen.

      On Sunday 18 June, Charlotte Waldie had been in Belgium for just six days. She had sailed from Ramsgate with her brother and sister on an overcrowded packet on the afternoon of the 10th, and thirty-six stifling and miserable hours later, had been rowed ashore from their becalmed boat in the dead of night, unceremoniously carried through the waves and dumped somewhere on the sands of the Belgian coast near Ostend.

      The family had been forced to leave servants, barouche and baggage behind when they abandoned the packet for their rowing boat, but Charlotte Waldie was not a gothic novelist for nothing, and anything tamer would probably have been a disappointment. The Waldies had no more idea than anyone else in Britain or Belgium of what might be happening on the other side of the French border, and after the English tourist’s customary genuflections in the direction of High Art and Rubens – and an audience in Ghent with the woefully unromantic ‘Louis le Désiré’ – had arrived in Brussels just in time to hear that Bonaparte had crossed the border and to follow half of the expatriate population in their panicked stampede from a city suddenly under threat.

      Only hours earlier, Brussels had seemed a place of ‘hope, confidence and busy expectation’, but as the first, confused reports from the front came in and the sound of cannon – twenty miles away? ten? five? no one could be sure – rolled across the now deserted Parc, Brussels turned on itself in a frantic struggle to get the last horse, carriage or cart out of the city before the French arrived. ‘Old men in their night-caps, women with dishevelled hair,’ Charlotte had watched the chaotic scenes in the courtyard below from her room in the Hôtel de Flandre, ‘masters and servants, ladies and stable boys, lords and beggars; Dutchmen, Belgians, and Britons, bewildered garçons and scared filles de chambre; all crowded together, jostling, crying, scolding, squabbling, lamenting, exclaiming, whipping, swearing and vociferating’.

      It had been a day of mayhem and fear, of crowded roads, of rumour and counter-rumour, of victory and defeat – the Prussians had held the French, the French had destroyed the Prussians, Wellington was wounded and the British defeated, the French were in retreat, Brussels was in French hands – and now, twenty-four hours later, as the sound of hammering ceased and the Laboureur Inn fell silent, Charlotte Waldie slipped out of her room and down the stairs to see for herself the other side of war. ‘It was a solemn and affecting scene,’ she recalled as she entered the same small chamber where Magdalene De Lancey had rested for an hour and which now contained ‘the last narrow mansion of a brave and unfortunate prince’. Tapers were burning at the head and foot of the coffin, and the room was now empty except for ‘two Brunswick officers who were watching over it, and whose pale, mournful countenances, sable uniforms, and nodding black plumes, well accorded with the gloomy chamber. It was but yesterday that this prince, in the flower of life and fortune, went out into the field of military ardour, and gloriously fell in battle, leading on his soldiers to the charge. He was the first of the noble warriors who fell on the memorable field of Quatre Bras. But he has lived long enough who has lived to acquire glory.’

      The coffin was that of Frederick William, Duke of Brunswick, the cousin of the Prince Regent, the brother of Queen Caroline, a favourite uncle of the Princess Charlotte, and one of the first casualties of Hazlitt’s battle between liberty and legitimacy. For the last six years the duke had held the rank of lieutenant general in the British Army, but it was as a hero of the German struggle against Bonaparte that he had made his name, raising, equipping and commanding his famous force of ‘Black Brunswickers’ in a quixotic and doomed bid to reclaim the duchy lost after the death of his father at Jena in 1806.

      With his flat, coarse potato of a face, his great side-whiskers and a nose that would have graced a Hanseatic merchant, it would be difficult to imagine a less romantic-looking figure than the duke. And yet in spite of everything that his sister Caroline could do to taint it, romance still clung to the Brunswick name. ‘The Brunswickers are all in black,’ the engagingly uxorious Sir Augustus Frazer, in command of Wellington’s horse artillery, had written home to his wife, after admiring the duke’s hussars at the great review in May, ‘the Duke having, in 1809, when the Duchess died, paid this tribute of respect to his wife. There is something romantic in this. They are to change their uniform when they shall have avenged themselves on the French for an insult offered to the remains of the Duke’s father. Is this chivalry, or barbarity?’

      It was a wonderfully nineteenth-century thought that the two things might be opposites – another prince dressed in black had very little trouble squaring them – and Wellington for one would have settled for something more barbarous than the army of young boys that Brunswick had brought with him. In the weeks since arriving in the Belgian capital, Wellington had complained endlessly of the ‘infamous army’ he had been given to do the job, but by the time it had at last become clear that the French advance towards Quatre Bras and Brussels was not a feint, he was in no position to pick and choose whether it was his old Peninsula veterans or the raw and untested Brunswickers who would get him out of the fix he had got himself into.

      That had been late on Thursday 15th, and that night anyway the duke had other things to do. He must have known as well as anyone that Bonaparte’s brilliant advance had not shown him at his best, but he had promised the Duchess of Richmond she could have her ball (‘Duchess, you may give your ball with the greatest safety, without fear of interruption,’ he had superbly told her) and he was damned if anything