For all his pride in his commission, the ‘Peasants’ of the 14th of Foot were not a fashionable lot and in any normal situation they would not have been allowed abroad, let alone on active service. The one saving grace for Keppel was that half of them were scarcely more than boys themselves, but even in a unit where fourteen of the officers and 300 of the rank and file were under the age of twenty, Keppel was the ‘baby’ of the battalion, ‘dry nursed’ by his seniors and saluted by his men with the kind of half-stifled smile that had had him hiding in embarrassment when he first joined them for embarkation at Ramsgate.
In spite of all the subsequent marching, however, it had not been a bad introduction to his new profession – there were always chance encounters with Westminsters, or an old ‘fag-master’ who had given him a ‘terrible licking for hiding in the coal-hole’, to make him feel at home – and above all they were going to get to fight. In the usual run of things the 14th would have been kept to garrison duties, but they had been saved from that by Lord Hill and on the evening of Saturday 17 June, Keppel and the rest of the battalion found themselves instead on the ridge of Mont-Saint-Jean queuing for their gin ration as part of the 4th Division’s 4th Brigade of Infantry.
The gin was pretty well the last thing Keppel could remember. His luggage had disappeared along with a baggage train two days earlier, but after the long march he was too tired to care about that, or anything else, and the next thing he knew was that it was two o’clock in the morning and he was lying flat out ‘in a mountain stream’ with his soldier-servant Bill Moles shaking him awake.
That had been two hours ago. Just behind where he lay was a cottage. As he went in he found three men sitting round a fire they had made out of broken-up chairs and tables, drying their clothes. Without speaking they made room for him. It was only when they put their uniforms back on that Keppel realised that one of them was Colonel Sir John Colborne – ‘afterwards General Lord Seaton GCB’ – and an old colleague of his brother’s in Spain. He was offered breakfast, but, ‘hungry as I was’, it was too ‘infinitesimally small’ to accept. It was a reminder, though, if a Keppel had ever needed one, of why he was there.
He was there because he belonged. Caste might trump rank, but it also brought with it its obligations and it was on the battlefield that they were met. For all his youth, as the second son of the 4th Earl of Albemarle, George was the beau ideal of what the Wellington army officer ought to be. Brought up from birth in an atmosphere of privilege, deference and noblesse oblige, with all the sanctions of habit, authority, wealth and the law arrayed behind him, he was the perfect instrument of command in a species of warfare that required only physical courage of its junior officers and blind obedience of its soldiers.
For the French officer who had carried the flaming sword of liberty, equality and fraternity to every part of Europe there was something morally repugnant about this. He would have been hard put to say what offended him most about Keppel, the aristocratic pedigree that outraged the meritocrat in him, or the utter ignorance of military matters that riled the professional man of arms. To the radical press at home, too, it was deeply offensive that an army was willing to sacrifice the lives ‘of hundreds of gallant countrymen’ to an outdated class system. And yet if he knew nothing else, Keppel knew the small print of the contract his class had made with society. ‘Mihi hodie, Tibi cras’ – ‘Me today, You tomorrow’ – a sign over the entrance to a military cemetery in the Far East warned Britain’s redcoats and after Quatre Bras no officer in Wellington’s army needed reminding of that. Five days earlier, Keppel had spent his sixteenth birthday at the Grammont race meeting with some fellow Westminsters. He had watched young Lord Hay, the darling of Brussels, dressed in his jockey’s silks, sitting in the scales, weighing out before a race. He ‘had hardly ever seen so handsome a lad’, he remembered, and now Hay was dead. It was a sobering thought.
George Keppel was brave – he would have behaved bravely whether it was naturally in him or not – but he was also young and he hated the wait. And now, as dawn was about to break, he could not get out of his head a story his father had told him. The earl had been speaking to the Bristolian bare-knuckle fighter, Henry ‘Game Chicken’ Pearce, just before his great battle with Daniel Mendoza for the Championship of England:
‘Well, Pearce,’ Albemarle had asked, ‘How do you feel?’
‘Well, my Lord,’ answered Pearce, ‘I wish it was fit.’
As George Keppel emerged from the cottage, still cold and hungry, his uniform drenched through, he stared out into the blackness towards the French lines and found Pearce’s words echoing and re-echoing in his brain. He too wished the fight was fit.
A Trellis of Roses
It had probably been as well for Hazlitt’s temper, as he and his wife walked home from the Lambs’, that he could not see into the offices in Maiden Lane on the north side of the Strand where that Sunday’s Examiner was being put to bed. On a good Sunday the newsboys would have collected their bundles an hour ago, but at times of crisis such as these, when foreign intelligence from Paris and the Low Countries was crowding home news off its sixteen, tight-crammed pages, the printers would be working deep into the early hours in a rush to get the paper on to the streets.
It had been a busy week both in and out of Parliament – the Budget; the annual loan; Wilberforce’s Slave Registration Bill; the Rosebery divorce; Lord Elgin’s petition for the purchase of his Greek marbles; the last Sunday of the Royal Academy exhibition; violence in Ireland, the usual slew of bankruptcies, an art robbery, the birth of a son to the Countess of Albemarle – but it was a small paragraph tucked away at the bottom of the third page that would have attracted Hazlitt’s ire. ‘The writer who is at present supplying our Theatrical Department,’ it read, ‘closed some masterly observations on Comus last week, with an attack on the tergiversation of some living poets, from which as far as Mr Wordsworth is concerned, we are anxious to express our dissent. If Mr WORDSWORTH praises any body, whom upon the whole neither the writer in question nor ourselves might think worthy of the panegyric, we are quite convinced, by the whole tenor of Mr WORDSWORTH’S life and productions, that he does it in a perfectly right spirit.’
If the disclaimer might have annoyed the ‘writer in question’, it would not have surprised him, because no two men who had so much in common could have been so far apart in temperament as William Hazlitt and James Henry Leigh Hunt. The Examiner and its editor were every bit as sceptical of Tory politics and placemen as Hazlitt himself, but Leigh Hunt was a Cavalier to Hazlitt’s Roundhead, a Suckling and not a Hampden, a poet of gentle, airy graces and high spirits, of fine and unworldly impulses, whose virtues and vices had yet to atrophy into the calculated helplessness that Dickens made such lethal use of in his portrait of Henry Skimpole.
Even at his angriest Hunt was a mocker not a ‘hater’. Where Hazlitt was all angry principle, Hunt was all exquisite feeling, a febrile, nervy creature, strung like some Aeolian harp to vibrate to the joys and sorrows of the world. In another century Hazlitt would have been found in the stocks with the Leveller John Lilburne or on the pyre with William Tyndale, but the hypochondriacal Hunt was not the stuff of which martyrs are usually made. It is one of the rummer ironies of the age that this Sunday, while the driven, misanthropic Hazlitt