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

the virtues of the meritocratic, professional navy and not of the hunting field – resilience, discipline, self-reliance, skill, initiative, intelligence and patriotism – that an industrialising, entrepreneurial, thrusting, inventive, self-confident, stubbornly independent nation liked to see herself reflected.

      It was a seductive idea, and one that would only grow and mutate with the century, and if there was no more truth in it than in most other national myths, the mere assumption of superiority had given the navy a psychological advantage that turned myth into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Over the last two decades the Bellerophon had played its part in some of the greatest victories of the war, and no veteran of the Nile or Trafalgar or the Glorious First of June – still less any French sailor skulking out of sight in Rochefort – would have had a moment’s doubt of the outcome should the French squadron ever venture out from the safety of the Basque Roads.

      There were fortunes to be made in the navy out of prize money too, and if Jane Austen’s Sir Walter Elliot might lament it as the death knell of all rank and society, a commercial nation of shopkeepers knew what a wonderful lubricant it could be. During the course of the war the corruption of the Admiralty prize courts had been a standing grievance among fighting sailors, but a rich ship was a happy ship and the lure of the prize money had successfully woven patriotism and greed into a kind of symbiotic double-helix that had printed aggression and daring into the DNA of every ambitious officer.

      In a culture and navy of this kind, simultaneously romantic and mercenary, it is probably no coincidence that so many of the navy’s leading captains were Scottish, and Frederick Maitland of the Bellerophon was only ordinary in the sense that there were so many like him. At the age of almost thirty-eight, he was no longer the brilliant young frigate captain of the popular imagination, but with his thin clever face, long nose and high cheekbones, he might have been the archetype of the Nelsonian officer, the kind of sailor – and the kind of face – that would have again made Sir Walter and his barber despair of the ravages that long years at sea could inflict on a man’s complexion.

      With the Maitland appearance (the family were not known in Edinburgh society for their looks) came the aristocratic Maitland connections, though even a boy of his background still had to make his own way in Nelson’s navy. From the seventeenth century the sons of the gentry had been entered into the service from a very early age, and while a junior officer like the young Wellington – Arthur Wesley as he then was – could happily trade commissions in and out of half a dozen regiments before he heard a shot fired in anger, the Frederick Maitlands of the navy had to learn and earn their promotions the hard way.

      Maitland had first seen battle as a midshipman during the French Revolutionary Wars at the Glorious First of June, and the next dozen years were spent in almost continuous fighting up and down the French and Spanish coasts. In 1799, he had been chased down and captured in the cutter Penelope, but that had been the only setback in a charmed career that had brought him a rich haul of prizes, prize money, votes of thanks and ultimately, in March 1815, on Bonaparte’s escape from Elba, the command of the old Billy Ruffian.

      The war had been good to Maitland, but as he prepared to join Sir Henry Hotham’s blockading squadron off the French coast he could not have dreamed that the best was yet to come. The fighting now belonged to the army and not the navy and there would have seemed little chance of either profit or excitement. On 24 May, however, the Bellerophon sailed from Cawsand Bay in Cornwall, and so it was that in the early hours of 18 June, in light winds and ‘small rain’, Captain Frederick Maitland found himself again in the Basque Roads, with La Rochelle and the Ile de Rey to the north and the great opening to the Gironde to the south. Between them lay the estuary of the Charente and Rochefort and the French squadron he had been despatched to watch. They were waters he knew well, and as the Bellerophon hove to for the captain of the Ulysses to come aboard, it would have been odd if his mind had not gone back to the last time he had been here, in the April of 1809. And odder still if he had not thought of another Scottish sailor, the most famous fighting captain of them all, ‘Le Loup de Mer’, as the French called him, to whose help he had gone that day.

7 a.m.

      Le Loup de Mer

      On the south side of the Thames, at the junction of Southwark’s Borough Road and Blackman Street, Thomas Cochrane was beginning the last forty-eight hours of his year-long sentence in one of the sadder curiosities of early nineteenth-century London. A few hundred yards to the north-west a great gallows beam high on the roof marked the entrance to Horsemonger Lane’s Surrey gaol, but King’s Bench prison dealt only in the small change of human misery and humiliation – in the debtors and bankrupts and their wives and children who lived here on the crumbling edges of society and on whatever their friends and families could provide to keep life and soul together.

      A cell in the King’s Bench – fifteen feet by ten and containing three beds – was the first room that Leigh Hunt could recall and its barrack-like corridors, filled with the laments ‘of aged and unhappy parents’ and weeping wives, his earliest introduction to the geography of London. Less than half a mile to the north, Dickens’s Marshalsea might provide copy for a lifetime of shame, but if one was looking for a genuine microcosm of the world’s greatest metropolis, a sink for all the deluded hopes, aspirations and ambitions that a voracious, commercial and imperial capital generated and disappointed, then the King’s Bench and its floating and permanent population of debtors was the place.

      It was not like Newgate to the north of the river, nor Horsemonger Lane, nor even the Marshalsea, and with its spacious parade and its speciously handsome Georgian buildings, its tap rooms, coffee house, marketplace and games of rackets, its atmosphere lay somewhere between an open prison, a refuge centre and a college for which the only entry qualifications were failure and ill-fortune. For the payment of a fee a debtor could enjoy the freedom of the prison ‘Rules’, an area of three square miles surrounding the gaol; but the immense spike-topped wall was a reminder that when night fell, and the last visitor had left and the only sounds were the cries of ailing babies, and the only view that of a blind wall just feet away, the King’s Bench was still a prison.

      Sometime in the middle hours of a March night three months earlier, when the watchman was at the farthest point of his prison rounds, a prisoner had paused in the window of his fourth-storey room with a length of rope looped around him and another shorter length in his hand. The fourth floor of the building was almost on a level with the top of the prison wall, and for a sailor in the prime of life a moment’s work was enough to throw a running noose over a spike, and another to swing his six-foot-two-inch frame out of the window and, hand-over-hand, across the twelve-foot gap between sill and outer wall.

      The prison wall was thirty-five feet high, and the narrow well beneath pitch-black, but once across he hauled himself on to the top and perched precariously between spikes while he secured the second rope to the ironwork. He had arranged with an old servant of his a safe house somewhere in the shadow of the prison wall below him, and had lowered himself nearly halfway down when his makeshift rope, smuggled into the prison in pieces, snapped and sent him crashing the last twenty feet to the ground.

      The bruised and unconscious escapee was Thomas Cochrane, better known as Lord Cochrane, demagogue rabble-rouser, inventor, Member of Parliament, heir to the 9th Earl of Dundonald, and the most brilliant, ungovernable and imaginative naval captain the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had produced. In the previous August, Cochrane had been sentenced to the stocks, a £1,000 fine and a year in the King’s Bench on a charge of fraud, but his troubles with the authorities had really started – if they did not start with his birth – on an April day five years earlier when he had joined Frederick Maitland and the rest of Admiral Gambier’s blockading force keeping an enemy fleet bound for the West Indies bottled up close to Rochefort in the inner Aix Road.

      Cochrane knew these coastal waters and shore defences intimately, and with a record for courage and unorthodoxy that stretched back to the first years of the war, had been despatched by the