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

off separately, with the numerical superiority on his side, he would confidently back himself to come out on top.

      With the benefit of hindsight, in fact, there was only one direction that Bonaparte would take in 1815, one area where the campaign would unfold, but Wellington had neither the benefit of hindsight nor in this instance even of foresight. The quality of his intelligence work in the Peninsula had made an important contribution to his success, but at this crucial juncture in European history, it for once failed him, leaving him utterly in the dark as to Bonaparte’s movements or intentions.

      Bonaparte had left Paris in the early hours of 12 June, and as he headed north to join his army, an unsuspecting Brussels went on very much as it had since the first news of his escape from Elba had reached it three months before. There were rumours on the 14th that something was afoot but there were always rumours in Brussels, and as the hours ticked away towards the greatest battle of the nineteenth century, men and women were still pouring into a city that in those three hectic months had been transformed from a continental bolt-hole for indigent British émigrés into a cross between a military cantonment and Vanity Fair.

      Among the unemployed soldiers and soldiers’ wives, commercial travellers, casual tourists, earnest Cambridge students, clergymen, invalids and antiquarians who made their way to Brussels in these early June days was a newly married woman of twenty-two called Magdalene De Lancey. On the face of it the new Lady De Lancey was everything Brussels society could have wished for, and yet if she was certainly grand enough on her mother’s side to have taken her place in the city’s expatriate aristocratic society, Magdalene Hall was as much her father’s daughter as her mother’s: the reserved, slightly awkward and stubbornly brave child of a family as famous in Scottish scientific and intellectual circles for its eccentricity as it was for its brilliance.

      Magdalene’s mother, Helen, was the gentle and long-suffering daughter of the Earl of Selkirk, and her father Sir James Hall of Dunglass – the fourth baronet – one of the more unusual products of Edinburgh and Scotland’s golden age. Sir James had inherited his title and estate on the Berwickshire coast at the age of only fifteen, and after university at both Cambridge and Edinburgh had set off on the Grand Tour in the last days of the ancien régime, exploring rocks and meeting fellow scientists, hatching crackpot architectural theories, studying farming methods and talking mathematics, mathematics and mathematics with a young Corsican army cadet studying at Brienne called Napoleon Bonaparte.

      It says something both for and about Sir James Hall that he had no memory of Bonaparte (the Emperor Napoleon, on the other hand, after more than thirty not entirely empty years, could clearly recall the first ‘Englishman’ he had ever met) but if this forgetfulness seems a tad casual Napoleon was not the only French tyrant that he had known. On the fall of the Bastille in 1789, Sir James had again crossed the Channel to be in Paris, and there he and his consumptive, republican brother-in-law, Lord Daer, had thrown themselves into revolutionary politics, attending the Assembly and Jacobin Club during the days and dining with Robespierre, Sieyès or Tom Paine at night during those last, fateful weeks of the doomed Bourbon monarchy and the ‘cochon’ Louis’s flight to Varenne.

      Republican, atheist, Jacobin: these were not the kind of credentials to make a man popular in the paranoid Tory Scotland of the 1790s, and even in good Whig circles the suspicions that Sir James was not quite all there would never entirely go away. There had always been a question in the family as to whether he would turn out a man of genius or an idiot, and with the jury still out on it when he died, something of the same suspicions would always hang over his children. ‘He was the second son of Sir James Hall,’ the brilliant memoirist Elizabeth Grant – the ‘Highland Lady’ – wrote of Magdalene’s older brother, Basil, ‘a man not actually crazy, but not far from it; so given up to scientific pursuits as to be incapable of attending to his private affairs … [Lady Helen] was a sister to the Lord Selkirk who went to colonise America. How could the children of such a pair escape. Their eldest son was a fool merely; Basil, flighty … the third, Jamie, used to cry unless Jane or I danced with him – nobody else would. Three or four beautiful girls died of consumption … two were idiots out at nurse somewhere in the country, and one had neither hands nor feet, only stumps. I used to wonder how Lady Helen kept her senses; calm she always looked, very kind, she always was, wrapped up her affections were in Basil and the two daughters who lived and married – Magdalene … Lady De Lancey … and Emily, the wife of an English clergyman.’

      The ‘fool’ of an eldest boy was, in fact, a painter and scientist of some distinction, Basil a lionised traveller and writer, and Sir James himself the president of the Scottish Royal Society, and yet it was anything but a cushioned world in which Magdalene Hall had grown up. As a young man her father had rowed the great geologist James Hutton around the shore by the Halls’ Dunglass estate, and if the young Magdalene, watching another sister sink into the grave, had ever wondered what kind of God could allow such suffering, her childhood walks along the cliffs at Siccar Point could have offered no easy consolations. ‘On us who saw these phenomena for the first time, the impression made will not be easily forgotten,’ the mathematician John Playfair wrote of the moment when he and Hall – two Doubting Thomases of the new science – saw for themselves in the folds and stacks of Siccar Point the indisputable physical evidence of the infinitely old, pitilessly indifferent universe that Hutton’s geology and Herschel’s telescopes were conjuring into existence: ‘What clearer evidence could we have had of the different formations of these rocks, and the long interval which separated their formation, had we actually seen them emerging from the bosom of the deep? We felt ourselves necessarily carried back to the time when the schistus on which we stood was yet at the bottom of the sea, and when the sandstone before us was only beginning to be deposited … An epoch still more remote presented itself, when even the most ancient of these rocks, instead of standing upright in vertical beds, lay in horizontal planes at the bottom of the sea, and was not yet disturbed by that unmeasurable force which has burst asunder the solid pavement of the globe. Revolutions still more remote appeared in the distance of this extraordinary perspective. The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.’

      For a young child of the Scottish Enlightenment schooled in the rigours of such a universe – the daughter of an atheist and the sister of two ‘idiot’ girls – it had been an improbably romantic path that had brought Magdalene Hall to Belgium. She had only met her husband for the first time a few months before, but six years earlier, her brother Basil, then a lieutenant with HMS Endymion taking part in the evacuation of Sir John Moore’s exhausted army from Corunna, had rescued and befriended a young, very tired, very dirty and unshaven army officer. ‘We divided the party among us,’ he later recalled, ‘and I was so much taken with one of these officers, that I urged him to accept such accommodation as my cabin and wardrobe afforded. He had come to us without one stitch of clothes beyond what he wore, and these, to say the truth, were not in the best condition, at the elbows and other angular points of his frame. Let that pass – he was as fine a fellow as ever stepped; and I had much pride and pleasure in taking care of him during the passage.’

      The threadbare army officer Basil Hall befriended was William Howe De Lancey, the twenty-seven-year-old, New York-born, English-educated scion of an American Huguenot family who had paid with their wealth and estates for their loyalty to the British crown during the American War of Independence. At the time of Corunna De Lancey was already a promising lieutenant colonel on the staff, and in the six years since he had consolidated his reputation as one of the most gifted of Wellington’s young officers, ending the war with the Talavera, Nive, Salamanca, St Sebastian and Vittoria clasps to his Peninsula Gold Cross and a KCB to underline the trust Wellington had in his abilities.

      In the inevitable way of war, sailor and soldier never met again, but the rising star of the army never forgot the naval lieutenant who had shared with him his cabin, linen and razor. On the abdication of Bonaparte in 1814, De Lancey had been appointed to a position on the staff in Scotland, and by the late spring of 1815 – Jane Austen’s Admiral Croft would have approved – had met, courted and wed the second of Sir James Hall’s three daughters, Basil’s sister Magdalene.

      Sir William and Lady De Lancey were at the Dunglass estate near Siccar Point on their ‘treaclemoon’ – as Byron, just escaped from his own honeymoon nightmare