This is the unique fascination of Waterloo, the chance it gives to see the country at that crucial moment in its history, fixed in all its trivial and mundane detail in the diaries, newspapers and letters of the time as firmly as Pompeii in the ash of Vesuvius. In the aftermath of the battle, Britain might enjoy prestige and power of a kind it had never known before; but if one could go back a day or even hours, if one could just go back to the Saturday evening of 17 June, to the Britain that ‘Mr Stevenson, engineer’ had buried in a time capsule at the opening of the new lighthouse at the Point of Caswell that morning – to a Britain that did not know it was going to win – did not know that the ‘Age of Waterloo’ was starting – a Britain that was no more united than the Edwardian Britain that would rush to war a hundred years later, what kind of country would we see?
I have begun the story of that night at the London home of Charles and Mary Lamb, where the fragile crust that separated Regency civilisation from brutal reality was at its thinnest, because their story is, in miniature, the story of the age itself. What lay behind the stuccoed elegance of Nash’s facades or the dazzling swank of Lawrence’s portraits on show at the Royal Academy this Saturday? What irresistible pressures for change were building up behind the matchless beauty and numinous historical resonance of England’s landscape? What would you have seen, if you could have looked through that telescope at Greenwich? Which lives, which stories unfolding that night, carried with them in some embryonic form the suggestion of the future?
And, finally, what was the Britain like that was in part created out of the mythology of Waterloo? For the men who fought it and the families who grieved it was a fight for freedom but for a great swathe of radical Britain it was the death knell of all their hopes. Which was it? Was Hugo, speaking as much as a liberal as a Frenchman, right? Or could the soldiers who fell along the Mont-Saint-Jean ridge at Waterloo die with the same confidence in their cause as their successors in Flanders a century later? The object of this book is to tell the story of that day and open out these questions. It shifts hour by hour, between Britain and Belgium, prison and palace, poet and pauper, though a warning note should be added to the timeframe of the events described. There are specific times here that we know from journals or memoirs or written orders, but how accurate they are is impossible to say. In Britain there would be no standardised time until the coming of the railways in the middle of the century – there might be anything up to twenty minutes difference between local mean time and Greenwich Mean Time – and when it comes to Belgium nobody can agree even so far as the time the battle began. Some contemporary accounts give it as early as nine in the morning, some recent historians as late as one in the afternoon. British officers’ watches would probably still be on London time, which explains why British accounts of the battle tend to place events earlier than French sources, but even within the allied ranks there was no synchronisation of watches that might narrow the gap. I have placed it – out of probability as well as narrative convenience – late in the morning as most of Britain was going to church and Sal and her tar were fondly looking at their cat.
‘The pilot who is carrying us into Liverpool, told us of Bonaparte’s return to Paris … Even in this age of tremendous revolutions, we have had none so appalling as this … When Napoleon was rejected from France, every man in Christendom, of honest principle and feelings, felt as if a weight of danger had been lifted from his prospects – as if he had a surer hope of going down to his grave in peace and leaving an inheritance to his children. But now the whole complexion of the world is changed again … God only can foresee the consequences.’
George Ticknor, 11 May 1815
In the early hours of 7 March 1815, the representatives of the five Great Powers meeting at Vienna to deliberate the future of post-Napoleonic Europe wearily adjourned the latest round of discussions. They had not solved the tricky problem of what to do with the king or the Kingdom of Saxony, but as they went to bed that night, they could, by and large, feel fairly satisfied with what they had done.
There were still outstanding issues and open sores – in Germany, in Italy, in Switzerland, with the Catholic Church, with disgruntled minor sovereigns and bitterly disappointed liberals and patriots – but if nobody had everything they wanted, nobody either had gone to war. Over the past six months there had been any number of potential flashpoints that might easily have led to bloodshed, but with an inimitable mixture of diplomacy, frivolity and old-fashioned horse-trading that marked the Congress of Vienna, Bourbon France had again been integrated into the brotherhood of civilised nations, Prussian and Russian territorial ambitions accommodated, British concerns over the Low Countries met and the principle of legitimacy – tempered with a brutal streak of realpolitik – firmly reasserted without recourse to arms. ‘May security, confidence and hope revive everywhere,’ read a draft declaration drawn up by the British, ‘and with them peaceful labour, progress in industry, and prosperity, both public and private! May sombre anxiety for the future not awaken or bring back the evils whose return the sovereigns would wish to prevent and whose last trace they would like to efface! May religious feeling, respect for established authority, obedience to the law and horror of everything that might disturb public order once again become the indissoluble ties of civil and political society! May fraternal relations, mutually useful and beneficent, be re-established between all lands! … And may homage at last be rendered to that eternal principle that there can be for nations as for individuals no real happiness but in the prosperity of all!’
It was an idealistic, if improbable dream – disinterest had been remarkable by its absence from the Congress – and even as the tired plenipotentiaries made their way to their beds or their mistresses on the morning of the 7th, couriers were on their way to Vienna to tell them the dream was over. At six that same morning the Austrian Foreign Secretary Count Metternich was woken by his valet with a despatch from Genoa marked ‘Urgent’, and within hours the whole of Vienna knew the worst: Napoleon Bonaparte, exiled by the allied powers to the island of Elba just eleven months earlier, had ‘disappeared’.
Neither the Austrian consul in Genoa nor the British representative in Florence had any idea where he was gone, but the money at Vienna was on Italy. In the rearrangement of Europe, Napoleon’s old marshal Joachim Murat had somehow clung on to the throne of Naples, but as British frigates desperately scoured the Mediterranean for some sign of the Great Disturber, Bonaparte himself, along with the small force of his old Imperial Guardsmen and Polish lancers that had been permitted him in his island exile, was landing on the French coast to reclaim his crown.
The ‘Tiger’, as the great portrait painter Sir Thomas Lawrence, with a Blake-like mix of awe and fear had called him, was again loose and when two days after Vienna the news reached Britain the country was swept up in a storm of excitement, speculation and fear. ‘What times we are living in,’ the ageing, half-cracked Mrs Piozzi – Dr Johnson’s Hester Thrale – wrote from Bath, a city, like some Regency Gomorrah, desperately searching Revelations to learn of its impending fate. ‘The events come forward as Scripture says they will do, like Pangs of Parturition; every Pain sharper than the last … I was a sad Blockhead to leave Faber’s Books upon the Prophecies behind me … they are so sought after now … While Buonaparte remained on Elba nobody thought of them: it must be very gratifying to the Author – That He should be immediately looked up to when all the Folks are wondering, and thinking What will come next? What will come next?’
It was a question that was being asked across the country, and for all the reliable intelligence