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

London slid into its nocturnal mode. ‘Dear God!’ wrote Wordsworth, ‘the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still,’ but he was wrong. London never slept. Across the water in Belgium, Wellington’s army lay shivering in the freezing, drenching rain to the south of Brussels; and in London people were still dying and being born, footpads were still working the streets, thieves still casing properties, gamblers still at the tables, ‘fashionables’ still at Lady Salisbury’s, wives who were now widows, mothers and fathers who were now without sons, still streaming home from the theatres, mercifully unconscious of the drama unfolding on the other side of the Channel.

      Everywhere, the great and small acts of life were being played out. At the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden, where thirty-five years earlier, Basil Montagu’s mother, Martha Ray, had been shot through the head by James Hackman as she climbed into her carriage, they had been watching The Fortune of War. At the Royal Amphitheatre, on the other side of the river, there had been ‘a Real Horse Race and a Real Fox Chase’ among the twenty-one scenes of Astley’s new equestrian pantomime. On the west side of Hare Court, Kean’s Wolf Club were just beginning the serious business of the night. A little farther past the Coalhole in the Strand, as old George Dyer hurried away to be the first with Lamb’s news of Castlereagh, the printers would be putting to bed the next day’s Examiner. In Bedford Square to the north of their office, Henry Hallam’s wife – the mother of Tennyson’s Hallam of ‘In Memoriam’ – had gone into labour. To the west, the hated Duke of Cumberland, just arrived in England to persuade Parliament to increase his allowance on his marriage to his German mistress, was walking home from Carlton House. To the east, London’s notorious Recorder, Sir John Silvester, the defending lawyer at Hackman’s trial thirty-five years earlier, was leaving a banquet at the Mansion House. A street away, behind the blank forbidding walls of Newgate gaol, a young woman Silvester had sentenced to death nine weeks earlier lay in the condemned cell waiting on the ‘fount of royal mercy’ that was the Prince Regent to learn her fate. At 13 Piccadilly, the newly married and pregnant Lady Byron was lying awake and awaiting the return of her husband, while across in Whitehall, his former mistress, dressed as a page, scribbled away furiously at the longest suicide note in history.

      And beyond London, spreading out in concentric rings across the blackness of the country and the farms and villages and towns of Britain, thirteen million souls lived out their own separate lives in this strange phoney pause in the nation’s life. At Hoxton, where Mary Lamb had spent so many months, officers and soldiers in the military asylum, forgotten victims of twenty years of war, lay, two to a cot, in their own stale urine. Somewhere out in the darkness, among the two million on parish relief this night, another mad old soldier, the Tortoise Man, would be asleep under his upturned barrow. On the south coast at Arundel, where the mighty Howard clan were gathered at the Duke of Norfolk’s castle, workers would be toiling through the night putting the last touches to the stands for the celebrations of the 600th anniversary of Magna Carta. At Wigan, a young boy, mauled that afternoon by a tiger at a menagerie, lay in agony with his face torn off. In Glasgow a gang readied themselves for the next day’s robbery of a textile shop and on the Isle of Harris, in the brief darkness of a Scottish midsummer night, a bloodied bundle lay unseen beside a pathway.

      And beyond Britain’s shores, out in the Downs, the thirty-one sail of the largest East India fleet ever assembled lay unseen in the mucky night. Off the coast of France, Sir Henry Hotham’s blockading squadron waited and watched. At the entrance to Botany Bay the Northampton Transport, with its 111 female convicts on board, was ending its six months voyage. In Brussels, Charles Burney’s sister, Fanny D’Arblay, lay fully clothed on her bed and waiting to flee. And as the rain poured down and the lightning flashed, a Scottish servant girl called Emma was carrying a folded note upstairs to the back room of a secluded town-house in Antwerp. The day of Waterloo had begun.

Midnight

      Belgium

      One of the strangest aspects of life in Belgium in these weeks and days before Waterloo is that people knew no more of what was going on than they did in Britain. It did not take a military strategist to realise that the first engagements of any campaign would occur in Flanders, but exactly when and where Bonaparte would strike was anyone’s guess.

      From the day that the Congress of Vienna declared him an outlaw Bonaparte had only two options in front of him, and one of those was in reality no option at all. With the allied armies advancing on the French frontiers from the east and the north-east he could in theory play the Fabian and simply wait in the hope of the allies falling out, but the only realistic, if slim, chance he had ever had of survival lay in taking on the enemy armies before they could unite, beating them in battle, and forcing the coalition to the negotiating table. If he simply sat and did nothing the sheer weight of allied numbers would inevitably overwhelm him. Military, political and geographical logic as well as time all pointed to a pre-emptive strike in the Low Countries before a Prussian army and a motley Anglo-Dutch force under the command of Wellington could invade France. In terms of national morale it made sense to fight any campaign on foreign soil, and with the loyalty of the Belgian population, only recently separated from France and joined with Holland in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, very much in question, an allied defeat in Flanders – and a defeat, especially, for the British paymasters whose gold was financing the coalition armies – opened up all sorts of potential political dreams.

      Nobody could be quite sure of the real extent of Bonaparte’s support in Belgium but it was not something Wellington ever felt it safe to ignore. There was clearly a deep resentment among its Catholic population at being forcibly lumped together with Protestant Holland under an Orange king, but if the experience of English travellers was anything to go by, that was nothing compared with the hatred that twenty years of French aggression and the destruction of their industry and trade through Bonaparte’s Continental system had caused. He had ruined their lace-makers, he had bankrupted their merchants, he had despoiled their art, he had taken their young men for his armies – ‘Il a mange tout,’ one traveller was told; ‘he cannot live without war, nor can the French; it is their trade; they live by it; they make their fortune by it; they place all their hopes in it; they are wolves that prey upon other nations, they live by blood and plunder.’

      Bonaparte’s hopes were not entirely fantasy, however, because a year of peace had brought no more contentment to Europe than it had to Britain. The end of war had been greeted across an exhausted continent with pretty well universal relief, but the return of old rulers, old rivals and old ways had performed their predictable alchemy on popular feeling, and one quick, decisive victory might conceivably be all that was required.

      If Bonaparte could have heard Wellington on the subject of the ‘infamous army’ he had under his command he would have had even more reason to be confident of his prospects. Wellington had finally left Vienna for his Brussels headquarters at the end of March, but even after more than two months of pressuring the government in London for reinforcements, his Anglo-Dutch army was still the most vulnerable of Bonaparte’s potential enemies, a rag-bag of Peninsula veterans, untried British battalions, Hanoverians, Nassauers, Brunswickers and Dutch and Belgian units spread out across a wide expanse of the Belgian countryside to the west of Brussels.

      Wellington’s army was never as bad as myth or Wellington would have it, though, and there was never any intention that he should fight the campaign alone. To the south-east of his positions were Marshal Gebhard von Blücher’s Prussians, and if they might not have been the army they had been under Frederick the Great, the defeat at Jena in 1806 had sparked a wave of military reforms that had turned them into a formidable and determined enemy of Bonaparte and all things French.

      Between the two allied armies, Wellington’s with his headquarters in Brussels and Blücher’s with his at Namur, was a force of around two hundred thousand men, but between the far right of the Anglo-Dutch and the far left of the Prussians lay something like one hundred and fifty miles of country, and in that gap lay Bonaparte’s best hope. It would never be possible for him to defeat their