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

– was that freedom of ‘Fancy’ that not even an attorney general ‘could commit … to custody’.

      In a brutal way, too, events had left him behind, because while Leigh Hunt had never been a Bonapartist in the way that Hazlitt was, the bloodlust of the ‘war-whoopers’, the cant of the Tory press, the self-defeating madness of driving the French people into Bonaparte’s arms, the horror of war and the prospect of another and stupider Bourbon tyranny succeeding to that of the ‘Great Apostate from Liberty’, left him stranded in a no-man’s land of despair. In this Sunday’s Examiner he wrote his usual sanely decent piece, but with dawn already breaking over the sodden and freezing armies in Belgium, and public opinion polarised between the Bonapartist ferocity of Hazlitt and Godwin and the baying of the bloodhounds, Hunt sounded not so much like a prophet crying in the wilderness as an escapist shut away in his Maida Vale hideaway.

      He had come out of prison at the wrong time: ‘Examiner Hunt’s’ finger could point where it liked, the world was going its own way. The old campaigning Hunt, with his lightness of touch, and debonair spirit was not entirely silenced, however. As the printers finished setting the last page of Edition Number 390, and the newsboys, working on the one day of the week on which they could hope to see their families before nightfall, waited impatiently to begin their rounds, it would have been odd if they had not paused over a small item beneath the announcement that the Countess of Albemarle, George Keppel’s mother, had given birth to another son – an item so at odds with the paper’s avowed, high-minded policy of avoiding gossip and society news that it bears the imprint of Leigh Hunt’s ironic sense of incongruities: ‘Capt. Bontein, of the Life Guards, son of Sir G.B. to the daughter of Sir E. Stanley,’ it read. ‘The parties rode out from Lady Bontein’s to take an airing before dinner; they took post chaise and four at Barnet, and proceeded to Gretna Green, whither they were unsuccessfully pursued by Lady Stanley. The only objection to the match was, it is said, the age of the bride, who is under fourteen, and has a handsome fortune. The Parties have since been remarried in London.’

      Huddled up with their horses in the freezing rain south of Brussels, Captain Bontein’s friends in the Life Guards would enjoy that. It was, though, another item that would interest the navy operating off the French coast: one relating to Thomas Cochrane, the country’s most famous sailor since Nelson. ‘It is well known that many respectable persons have all along believed LORD COCHRANE to be perfectly free from any concern in the wretched fraud practised by De Berenger and others on the Stock Exchange,’ The Examiner announced. ‘This opinion, we are informed, will soon be shown to be the correct one … and that his Lordship had not the slightest knowledge of their dirty schemes.’

6 a.m.

      The Billy Ruffian

      There was a touch of rain in the air and the breeze was fresh as the seventy-four-gun HMS Bellerophon shook a reef out of its top sails and fell in with Myrmidon and Eridanus. Within the shelter of Rochefort’s harbour just over the horizon two French frigates lay at anchor, and if history and the British sailor were anything to go by, that was precisely where they were going to stay, safely bottled up in port by the Royal Navy until the war was over.

      Blockading was not romantic or exciting work, it was not the stuff of reputations or the road to riches, but for the navy and ships such as the Bellerophon – the ‘Billy Ruffian’ – it was what they had been doing for the last twenty years. The glamour of the service might belong to the frigate captains who had made household names of the Speedy or Imperieuse, but it was here on blockade duty off the coast of Europe, from the Baltic down to the Mediterranean, year after year, in all weathers, summer and winter, night and day, that those fighting and sailing skills had been honed that had strangled the continent’s trade and won the war for Britain.

      The Nelsonian man o’ war was no more narrowly British than was Wellington’s army – you could have found English, Scottish, Irish, Americans, Canadians, Danes, Swedes, Spaniards, Portuguese, Puerto Ricans and Venetians fighting together in the same floating Babel – though it would have been an uphill task to persuade the British public of that. For a thousand years the sea had played a crucial role in the island’s story, and a golden age of victories that left Britain in undisputed command of the oceans and of her own destiny had given the British tar and man of war a place in its heart no regiment or Tommy Atkins could rival.

      For all the hatred of the press gangs, and the resentments of the merchant fleets robbed of manpower, the British loved the Royal Navy in a way that it had never loved the army. Over the past century the British soldier had fought and beat the French from Quebec to Pondicherry, but while victory at Blenheim or Ramillies or Minden might command an ode or add to the invincible conceit of John Bull, they were not triumphs that were bound up with the security, history and identity of an island race in the way that were the navy’s.

      It was not a mere matter of sentiment, either, because nobody looking out to sea at six o’clock this morning, to where the greatest East India fleet ever assembled lay spread across the Downs, could forget its role in the prosperity that had sustained Britain through two decades of war. For more than twenty years the navy had convoyed the world’s trade across the face of the globe, and from Liverpool to Gravesend – from the Isabella and Aimwell just arrived from Surinam and Barbados with their cargoes of sugar, cotton, coffee, aloes, ginger and tamarind, to the Heinrich from Danzig, the Frau Anna from Stockholm, the Jason from Memel and the Frederick from Hamburg – the country’s great ports and quaysides rang to the same commercial tune that the navy had made possible. ‘The following account of one pound weight of manufactured cotton strikingly evinces the importance of that trade to Great Britain,’ Exeter’s subscribers to The Alfred could have read in the latest edition this Sunday; ‘there was sent off to London, lately, a small piece of muslin, about one pound weight, the history of which is thus related; it was come from the East Indies to London; from London it went to Lancashire, where it was manufactured into yarn; from Manchester it came to Paisley, and there was veined; afterwards it was sent to Dumbarton, where it was hand sewed, and again brought to Paisley, whence it went to Glasgow and was finished, and from Glasgow it was sent per-coach to London.’

      The British loved this drum-roll to their island’s prosperity, loved the rattle of figures – the three years from picking to warehouse, the 5,000 miles by sea, the 920 miles by land, the 150 people employed in a single pound of cotton, the 2,000 per cent profit – and knew that this was how they had brought Bonaparte to his knees. Since the days of the Younger Pitt the country had been financing her continental allies, and as the Prussian, Russian and Austrian armies of the Seventh Coalition again marched against France on British gold, Britons could look out to sea and know that it was a war that their efforts and their industry would sustain as long as was necessary.

      The Robert Quayle from St Domingo, carrying cotton, sugar, tea, coffee and mahogany; the Unicorn from Demerara with its rum and molasses; the Sally from Trinidad with its lime juice and indigo; the Vestal from New York with cotton and flaxseed, the Integrity from Charleston; they were all in Liverpool this Sunday. Before the day was out the Jackson would sail from Gravesend for Oporto and the Minerva for Gibraltar and the Anna for Riga and the Acorn for St Petersburg, and for as long as most people could recall it was the navy that had controlled these sea channels. It had kept open the Great Belt and the Baltic, it had supplied Britain’s armies in Spain with its specie from South America and its grain; it had suppressed the coastal trade of Europe and turned the Mediterranean into a British lake. There had been reverses against the Americans – though they were being quietly massaged away – and there had been little to brag of since Trafalgar but for the public and sailor alike a British warship was the British character in action and the Royal Navy officer the incarnation of everything that made Britain innately superior to her enemies. Over the last few years the victories of Wellington’s armies in Spain had gone some way to redressing the balance, but if the young Romantic, Thomas De Quincey,