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William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2015

First published in Great Britain as Went the Day Well? Witnessing Waterloo by William Collins in 2015

Copyright © David Crane 2015

David Crane asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library

Cover image: Studies of Royal Horse Artillery Uniform, and of an A.D.C. to the Commander in Chief: a study for ‘The Battle of Waterloo’ (oil on board) by Jones, George (1786–1869), Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, USA/Bridgeman Images.

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Source ISBN: 9780007358366

Ebook Edition © January 2015 ISBN: 9780007358373

Version: 2015-11-27

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Maps

Prologue

PART I

The Tiger is Out

Midnight: Belgium

1 a.m.: Cut

2 a.m.: Dance of Death

3 a.m.: A Dying World

4 a.m.: I Wish It Was Fit

5 a.m.: A Trellis of Roses

6 a.m.: The Billy Ruffian

7 a.m.: Le Loup de Mer

8 a.m.: The ‘Article’

9 a.m.: Carrot and Stick

10 a.m.: The Sinews of War

11 a.m.: The Sabbath

12 noon: Ah, You Don’t Know Macdonell

1 p.m.: Never Such a Period as This

2 p.m.: Ha, Ha

3 p.m.: The Walking Dead

4 p.m.: The Finger of Providence

5 p.m.: Portraits, Portraits, Portraits

6 p.m.: Vorwärts

7 p.m.: Noblesse Oblige

8 p.m.: A Mild Contusion

9 p.m.: Religionis Causa

10 p.m.: Clay Men

11 p.m.: Went the Day Well?

PART II

The Opening of the Vials

The Days That Are Gone

New Battle Lines

Myth Triumphant

Notes on the Text

Reference Notes

Select Bibliography

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Picture Section

Index

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

Epigraph

Went the day well?

We died and never knew.

But, well or ill,

Freedom, we died for you.

John Maxwell Edmonds

Prologue

‘There exists a highly respectable school of liberal thought which does not deplore Waterloo. We are not of their number. To us Waterloo is the date of the confounding of liberty.’

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

On any Sunday or holiday around the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the naval pensioners of Greenwich Hospital, dressed in their tricorn hats and blue uniforms, could be found under a tree near the Observatory in the Park, their telescopes set up, their old yarns of Trafalgar and the Nile primed for retelling, waiting for trade. From the summit of the hill on which they stood the view stretched northwards over the marshes towards Barking church and Epping Forest, and westwards across a forest of masts and docks to the London of Wren, St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey.

It was a sight to make a foreigner quail at the trading might of a modern Tyre – there might be more than two thousand ships lying in the Thames at any one time – but for the Sunday holiday-makers who had made their way up Observatory Hill there was a more macabre demonstration of Britain’s naval power. For the last four hundred years crimes at sea had been punished with all the symbolic pomp the Admiralty could manage at Wapping’s Execution Dock, and for the price of a penny, the pensioners’ customers could hire a telescope and take their fill of the latest victims of naval justice, their bodies tarred and chained, and hanging in iron cages from a gibbet at the river’s edge as a warning against piracy.

On one such holiday in the early summer, while the hawthorn was still out and the great elms and chestnuts of Greenwich Park were looking their best, the humorist and poet Thomas Hood had paid his penny to see the sights and was sitting beneath the trees near the Observatory, watching the early-comers queue to take their turn. In almost every instance the first thing they asked to see were the ‘men in chains’ across the river on the Isle of Dogs, but there was one exception – a young woman he had watched climbing the hill on the arm of her husband, a swarthy-looking able-bodied seaman ‘with a new hat on his Saracen-looking head, a handkerchief full of apples in his left hand, with a bottle neck sticking out of his jacket for a nosegay’ – and it was this pair who caught Hood’s attention.

When it came to their turn, the sailor asked one of the ‘telescope-keepers’ to point out the men in chains for his ‘good lady’, but she told him that ‘she wanted to see something else first’.

‘Well!’ he wanted to know. ‘What is it you’d like better, you fool you?’

‘Why. I wants to see our house in the court, with the flowerpots, and if I don’t see that I won’t see nothing. What’s the men in chains to that? Give us an apple.’ There was nothing he could say that was going to change her mind, and while he consoled himself with his bottle she took an apple out of the bundle and told the pensioner to turn the telescope towards Limehouse church.

‘Here, Jack! Here it is, pots and all!’ she suddenly screamed. ‘And that’s our bedpost. I left the window up o’purpose as I might see it.’

Jack himself took an observation. ‘D’you see it, Jack?’

‘Yes.’

‘D’ye see the pots?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the bedpost?’

‘Ay, and here Sal, here, here’s the cat looking out of the window.’

‘Come away, let’s look again.’ And then she looked, and squalled, ‘Lord! What a sweet place it is!’ And then she assented to seeing the men in chains, giving Jack the first look.

Anyone familiar with Bruegel’s painting of the Fall of Icarus, with the labourers in the foreground pressing on with the ploughing, unconscious or utterly indifferent to the drama unfolding behind them, will hardly need the reminder but Thomas Hood’s Sal is still a useful warning about the way we see history. For all those nineteenth-century Britons who grew up with the memory of Waterloo, 18 June 1815 could only mean one thing, and yet for the men and women who lived through that day, carrying on their ordinary Sunday lives, going to Greenwich Park or church, oblivious to the fact that on the other side of the Channel the greatest single act of Sabbath breaking in British history was unfolding, it was a different story.

He didn’t think he would ever recover from this, a tragic Thomas Fremantle wrote in his diary after being bowled out for a duck in a school match at Eton, and it is this profoundly human mix of the extraordinary and the everyday, that gives the day of Waterloo its peculiar, haunting character. For two long weeks in the June of 1815 the country had been forced to live in that anxious limbo between events and report, and even as Wellington’s rain-sodden army was retreating towards Brussels for the final, decisive battle, men and women across the country were still going to the theatre and science lectures, still working in the fields and the factories, still reading and writing their sermons, still applauding the Duke of York’s winners at Ascot and buying their lottery tickets, blithely unconscious that there was such a place as Waterloo, or that the children who would be born that Sunday would be born into a different Britain from the Britain that for the last twenty years had struggled with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France.

I should like to have been able to say that this book was the story of Britain’s pots and cats and chained men on this, the most important day in its nineteenth-century history, but that might lead to the wrong expectations. This is not a social history of the kind that tells what people wore or the time at which they ate, but a book about the intersection of the private and public spheres, about the ways in which individuals are touched by remote events, and how much – or how little – of what we usually think of as mainstream history actually impinged on the lives of ordinary men and women who witnessed Waterloo.

‘And what should they know of England who only England know?’ Rudyard Kipling asked in the last heady days of Empire, and the same question might just as well be posed of the Britain that defeated Bonaparte. The Regency age carries with it such brilliant aristocratic and literary associations that it is very hard to look past them, but this was as much the age of the Highland Clearances and brutal misery as of Byron, Prinny, and Almacks, an age of such violent cultural, intellectual and economic extremes and contrasts that it is difficult to believe that the events described here took place in the same century let alone the same country.

This is a book about that country, the Britain that fought Waterloo and the very different Britain that emerged triumphant from it, and if it says more about the casualties of victory than it does about its rewards then that is because the latter hardly need spelling out. For another hundred years the country would bask in the rich afterglow of victory, and yet while successive generations could grow up with the comforting assurance of God’s special dispensation for his chosen people, there was another Britain – the Britain of the prison and the poorhouse glimpsed here through the smoke of battle and the burgeoning mythology of Waterloo – that would never see the fruits of a war that had framed, blighted or ended their obscure lives.

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.

PART I

The Tiger is Out

‘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 that anyone had one that was as likely to be answered in Revelations as it was anywhere else. The first reports of Napoleon’s escape had not reached London until 9 March, and by then the news was more than ten days out of date and the desperate ‘adventurer’ who had landed near Antibes with barely a thousand men was already halfway to Paris and, ‘God knows how, and in the twinkling of an eye’, as The Champion’s editor, John Scott, reported from France, ‘up again and in all his meteor-like intensity shaking from his “horrid hair” portentous flashings over the astounded world’.

Antibes, Grasse, Castellane, Grenoble, Lyons – a man would need ‘the wings of a demon’ to keep pace with his progress, the Edinburgh Courier told its alarmed readers. No sooner had one shock been absorbed than there was another to face. On 7 March, Lord Fitzroy Somerset had written from Paris that there was nothing to fear for himself or his pregnant wife, but by the time the letter reached his brother in England the ‘monster’ that Marshal Ney had vowed to bring back in a cage was again emperor in his old capital and Louis XVIII once more on his way into exile.

‘What a dreadful prospect is thus suddenly opened to mankind! What dismay must not these tidings strike into the hearts of hundreds of thousands of human beings in every station of life,’ the great reforming lawyer, Sir Samuel Romilly, had written in his diary, and yet even as London held its breath and hoped, Europe was already mobilising for war. ‘Napoleon Bonaparte, by again appearing in France with projects of confusion and disorder,’ the Congress of Sovereigns famously declared, ‘has deprived himself of the protection of the law, and in consequence has placed himself without the pale of civil and social relations; and, as an enemy and disturber of the tranquillity of the world, has rendered himself liable to public vengeance.’

After less than a year of quiet, Europe was again in arms, and as the sovereigns at Vienna returned Napoleon’s protestations of peace unanswered, and the Duke of Wellington left the Austrian capital for Brussels to take command of the allied army in the Low Countries, a bewildered Britain took stock of the new reality. For more than twenty wearying years it had been at war with either Revolutionary or Napoleonic France, and for half the population those few delusory months sandwiched between Napoleon’s abdication and escape were virtually the only peace they had ever known.

For as long as many could remember the aspirations and hopes of a whole nation had effectively been put on hold. In terms of battlefield deaths the British Army would lose more lives on a single day in 1916 than it had in these twenty years combined, but by any other measure than a butcher’s bill it had been a ‘total war’, consuming the energies and talents of the whole country, changing the land and shrinking distances, stifling reform and reaching into every facet of life in a military and economic struggle that had left Britain with the undisputed command of the world’s trade, a national debt of £861 million, one in five of the population on the poor rates, and a whole thwarted generation longing for political change. ‘In 1814 a war which had lasted so long that war seemed our natural state was felt to be over,’ wrote the Edinburgh lawyer, Henry Cockburn, recalling the sense of a new beginning that Napoleon’s exile just eleven short months earlier had seemed to promise; ‘from this moment the appearance of everything was changed. Fear of invasion, contempt of economy, the glory of our arms, the propriety of suppressing every murmur at any home abuse, the utter absorption of every feeling in the duty of warlike union – these, and other principles, which for twenty years had sunk the whole morality of patriotism in the single object of acknowledging no defect or grievance in our own system, in order that we might be more powerful abroad, became all inapplicable to existing things.’

Nobody who had not lived through that first heady summer of 1814, insisted the painter Benjamin Haydon, could have any inkling of what it was like to feel a whole country’s exhilarating sense of liberation. For the first time since the phoney peace of 1802, ordinary men and women had been able to travel abroad again, and as naval and Peninsular officers married, and their wives got pregnant and the country’s women caught up with fashions, and British artists saw Old Masters they had known only from prints, Britain looked forward to a world un-shadowed by war. ‘All the town was out to see them,’1 the great Victorian engineer, James Nasmyth – just a lad at the time – recalled of the magical night when the whole city of Edinburgh, generous in victory to a beaten foe, had turned out to watch the passage of French prisoners from the castle down to their transports at Leith; ‘they passed in military procession through the principal streets, singing as they marched along their revolutionary airs, “Ça Ira” and “The Marseillaise.” The wild enthusiasm of these haggard-looking men, lit up by torchlight and accompanied by the cheers of the dense crowd who lined the streets and filled the windows, made an impression on my mind that I can never forget.’

In the year since then peace had delivered on few of the hopes of Cockburn and his fellow liberals – the brilliant Summer of Sovereigns of 1814, when London had been en fête for the Emperor of Russia and crowds pulled Blücher’s carriage through its streets, was already a fading memory – but to a great swathe of the country peace at any price was better than more death, taxation and hardship. ‘We are at the moment smarting under an almost intolerable load of taxation, incurred in fighting other peoples’ battles and in dictating to other nations whether they shall have for their ruler King Stork or King Log,’ the Liverpool Mercury had protested bitterly when the first news of Bonaparte’s escape reached England. ‘Such idle squabbles have deeply injured our moral character, almost exhausted our national resources; and reduced a great portion of our population to a state of ignominy or dependency … To enter into a new war, under such circumstances, must entail upon our country a complication of evils, which cannot be thought of by the philanthropist or the patriot, without the most melancholy forebodings.’

It was perhaps predictable enough that Liverpool merchants, who had scarcely finished toasting the end of hostilities with America, were against another war, but what astonished George Ticknor, an engaging and well-connected young New Englander in Britain for the first time, was the breadth and depth of opposition. He had been taken up in Liverpool by the littérateur and philanthropist William Roscoe, and armed with introductions had made his leisurely way down to London via the Hatton parsonage where the man known as the ‘Whig Johnson’ – the redoubtable classical scholar and pedagogue Dr Samuel Parr – left him in no doubt that it was not just mercantile Liverpool that was against the war. ‘I am for Napoleon versus the pilferers of his pensions and the kidnappers of his person,’ Parr declared, ‘for the army and people of France versus any and every foreign power, which should presume to oppose their sacred right to choose their own sovereign – for brave men versus assassins – for wise men versus blundering monsters – for insurgents in one country versus the confederate enemies of freedom and independence in all countries – for the countless many versus the worthless few – and finally, for a reasonable peace versus unnecessary, unjust and inhuman war.’

For all the rhetorical flourishes, here was the genuine voice of old Whiggery, and ranged alongside Parr was a rainbow coalition that reached from the usual radical suspects at one end to all those children of the Romantic age clinging on to a hero-worship that no crime, betrayal or excess of Bonaparte’s could ever quite eradicate. From London’s clubs to the Royal Academy, from the pages of The Examiner and the columns of The Times to private letters, the debate raged on – it was a war against Liberty, it was a war against Tyranny, it was a Tory war, it was a Necessary war, it was a war for Autocracy against Humanity, it was a war for Christianity against Barbarism – and neither side had any monopoly on the violence of its opinions. For every William Godwin preaching the ‘extirpation’ of the allied soldiers, there was a Wordsworth damning ‘That soul of Evil … from Hell let loose’; for every vinegary old radical like William Blake’s wife demanding the head of poor, mad King George or Byron looking forward to seeing Castlereagh’s adorning a French pike, there were loyal theatre audiences ready to cheer anything remotely royalist to the rafters.

In spite of all the white noise of angry protest in Parliament and in the liberal and radical press, there was a groundswell of patriotic support for the war for which a deeply unpopular government and a despised Prince Regent had only the French to thank. Through the spring of 1815 there had been violent and widespread rioting over the imposition of Corn Laws, but there was no race quite like the French – ‘vain, insolent, shallow … tender without heart, pale, fierce, and elegant in their looks, depraved, lecherous, and blasphemous in their natures!’– and no enemy like Boney to make John Bull forget the price of bread or the weight of his taxes and roll up his sleeves for another fight.

There had never been any doubt, either, in the minds of Lord Liverpool’s Tory government that they would have to fight, and as Britain moved smoothly on to a war footing, and soldiers lobbied for employment and made their wills, and cheering crowds waved goodbye to transports carrying troops to Belgium, and the borders of France were closed and intelligence dried up, the country steeled itself against the coming storm. Since the first battles of the 1790s, parents and wives had lived in permanent dread of the news the Gazettes might bring them, and now again they found themselves trapped in that old, familiar limbo of apprehension and suspense, fighting over the last newspaper or pushing their way through the agitated scrums around booksellers to read the latest placard pasted in the windows.

There would not have been a town in Britain that was not sending its soldiers to Belgium during those weeks of May and early June, hardly a household that was not holding its breath, because never since the Armada had the hopes and fears of the whole country hung on the outcome of one event in the way that they did on the eve of Waterloo. At the height of French invasion scares eleven years earlier the whole country had been caught up in the demands of total war, but these early summer days in 1815 were different again from anything that the country had known, different in immediacy, different in the fissures revealed in society, and different, above all, in that sense of suspended time – William Wilberforce’s ‘fearful interval’ – during which a schizophrenic nation, one face pointed towards Belgium and the other hell-bent on its ordinary pleasures, waited for the first news that hostilities had commenced.

It was on one such day in the middle of June, a Saturday that had seemed like any other that month, at some time after ten in the evening that a middle-aged man might have been seen walking down Chancery Lane in the direction of the Thames. At the bottom of the lane he crossed over to the south side of Fleet Street, and pushing his way through a small wicket gate in an archway beneath a big painted sign for the ‘Waxworks’ paused at the doorway of an old, brick-built terrace house on the right-hand side of Inner Temple Lane.

After the brightness and noise of Fleet Street, there would have been something almost palpable in the silence of the Temple, as if the City itself held its breath, listening to the muffled sounds of lives that went unheard or unnoticed on the other side of Temple Gate. Fifty yards to the west the Coalhole Tavern would be steeling itself against the raucous arrival of the actor Edmund Kean’s ‘Wolf Club’, but for the moment the Inns of Court was a world apart, the still centre of a London that never slept, hidden away between the teeming flow of river life to the south and the ‘bustle and wickedness’ of Covent Garden to the north; between the political and social heartland of Westminster to the west and the City to the east.

It would have been odd if anyone had noticed Henry Crabb Robinson – with his long plain face, boxer’s nose and receding hairline there was nothing remarkable about him – but if Robinson was Everyman he also knew everyone and in that lay his solitary claim to fame. As a young man he had shared in the political excitement of the 1790s until time and necessity had sobered him, and at the age of forty-five he was a jobbing barrister on the Norfolk circuit of no particular ambition, a Boswell manqué with nothing of his genius or his vices; a decent, good-natured, worthy, middle-aged bachelor on the long, slow downhill road from youthful, Godwinian radicalism to respectable, philanthropic, Victorian liberalism.

The old red-brick terrace that dated back to the days of the Commonwealth was rich in the kind of literary associations Robinson loved – Dr Johnson had lived at No 1 when he had first come down to London, Boswell in a typical act of homage at No 2 – and for the last six years Inner Temple Lane had been the home of Charles Lamb and his sister Mary. As a young boy Charles had fetched the family’s water from the pump in the gloomy garden at the back of the house, and if the water only came with brandy these days, Hare Court was still as near to a place of childhood safety as anywhere in their haunted, restless lives that the Lambs would ever know.

Lamb loved the London that lay just the other side of the Temple Gate – its streets and playhouses, its churches and markets, its lighted shops and pretty milliners, its drunken bucks, tradesmen, whores and beggars, its coffee houses, bookstalls and print shops, its scuffles and pickpockets, even ‘the very dirt and mud’ – but he needed Hare Court and the shelter of the Temple precinct. In his younger days he had liked to fancy himself a Londoner in the robust eighteenth-century mould of a Johnson or Boswell, but Lamb was a spectator at the feast rather than a participant, a connoisseur and collector of the city’s sights and sounds, happiest and most secure when he could pull up the drawbridge and, surrounded by his friends and his mildewed books and his old furniture and the comforting ghosts of childhood, listen for the distant voice of the watchman or the muffled cry of ‘Fire’.

With its three dusty elms and dusty sparrows and graveyard gloom, situated just yards away from his beloved Fleet Street, Hare Court was not just Lamb’s metropolitan ideal but his ideal of the countryside too. From their old lodgings in King’s Bench Walk there had been a distant view across the Thames to the Surrey Hills, and save for the Temple Gardens or a walk along London’s New River, that was as close as the most doggedly un-romantic of all the Romantics liked ‘dead Nature’ to come. ‘I don’t much care if I never see a mountain in my life,’ he had written to Wordsworth fifteen years earlier, fending off an invitation to join him and his sister Dorothy for a holiday in the Lakes. ‘Your sun and moon and skies and hills and lakes affect me no more … than as a gilded room with tapestry and tapers, where I might live with handsome visible objects. I consider the clouds above me but as a roof, beautifully painted but unable to satisfy the mind … My attachments are all local, purely local … The rooms where I was born, the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a bookcase which has followed me about (like a faithful dog, only exceeding him in knowledge), wherever I have moved, old chairs, old tables, streets, squares, where I have sunned myself, my old school – these are my mistresses.’

For the last forty-five years this had been the whole circumference of Lamb’s world – the Temple, Christ’s Hospital, Bishopsgate, the clerks’ office in the East India Company – and the only world he had ever wanted. From time to time he and his sister Mary would be forced to move a few hundred yards in one direction or another, but it was only here among the clerks and Benchers of the Temple, in the prelapsarian world of their childhoods, that he was at home and as safe as he could ever be from the horror that for the last twenty years had shadowed the quiet, external tenor of their lives.

The horror had begun one Thursday afternoon in September in 1796, as a young seamstress was preparing dinner for her family in their cramped Holborn rooms just to the north of the Temple. For some reason that the coroner’s court could only guess at, the girl had suddenly seized a knife that was lying on the table, and baulked of killing her child apprentice, had turned on her bedridden mother and savagely stabbed her through the heart before the child’s screams could bring their landlord. ‘It seems the young lady had once before, in her earlier years, deranged, from the harassing fatigues of too much business,’ the Morning Chronicle reported; ‘as her carriage towards her mother was ever affectionate in the extreme, it is believed that in the increased attentiveness, which her parents’ infirmities called for by day and night, is to be attributed the present insanity of this ill-fated young woman.’

The fragile and harassed young woman was Mary, the bout of madness lasted only days – the coroner’s court found her insane but released her to her brother’s care – and for almost two decades that had been his life. Every few years rumours of their old tragedy would surface and the Lambs would be forced to shift their lodgings, but for nineteen heroic years Charles Lamb had fought to keep the world and his own incipient madness at bay, collaborating with Mary on her children’s stories and Tales, carrying her straitjacket for her on her sad, voluntary exiles to the Hoxton asylum whenever another attack threatened, and rising each day for thirty-three years to the drudgery of the East India Company accounts department to ensure that there would be a refuge to which she could return.

Over the years the loss and the perpetual anxiety for both Mary and his own mental state had taken its toll on Charles – it was there in the face, in the lines of suffering, the sadness in the smile, the misanthropic edge to his humour, the alcohol, the dark, unnerving depths that lay just beyond the bubbling shallows of his talk – but perhaps the strangest thing of all about Mary’s illness is that she never felt any guilt for what she had done. In the first days after the attack she had come to believe that a benevolent providence had ordained her mother’s death, and at some subconscious level madness remained almost as much a release as an affliction for her, an escape from the dull chrysalis of a spinsterish middle-age into a brilliant, fantasy past through which she glided with the abandoned licence of some dazzling court beauty of the age of Queen Anne and Congreve.

No one was more gentle or self-effacingly ‘feminine’ than Mary in her sane periods – the only woman of complete sense he had ever known, William Hazlitt claimed – and no one more brilliant or abandoned in her madness. It would have been less disquieting had their friends been able to see her insanity as something utterly unconnected with her ‘real’ personality, but nobody who heard her ravings – brilliant disjointed flashes of wit, sparkling jewels wrenched from their settings – could doubt that she was never so free as when she was in her straitjacket and never so restrained as when well.

Even for the most seasoned Lamb-watcher, in fact, it was hard to be sure who was looking after whom in Hare Court, or who had sacrificed most to create one, indivisible being out of the wreckage of their damaged lives, but no household in London ever attracted more loyal friends. For those who did not know the history of mental illness there was always something inexplicably odd about Charles, but for his discreet and inner circle of devotees, his defensive carapace of jokes and puns and antique flights of humour, eccentricities, reckless bursts of levity and bouts of helpless drunkenness – the ‘between the acts’ of his ‘distressful drama’ as he engagingly called them – only added a note of vulnerability that bound them even more protectively to him.

There were more glamorous, more distinguished, more powerful literary salons and coteries to be found in London – the room above Murray’s bookshop in Albemarle Street where, under the malignant Thomas Gifford, the Tory Quarterly was hatched; the great Whig Holland House set where Sydney Smith sang for his supper – but nowhere could you meet with such a mixed crowd of people as at Lamb’s. If Charles Lamb had any politics they were certainly on the liberal side of the debate, but that had never stopped his friends spanning the full gamut of political opinion, from Utopian revolutionaries-turned-Tories such as Southey, Coleridge or Wordsworth at one end of the spectrum, to the likes of Hazlitt, Godwin, Leigh Hunt and the radical journalist and satirist William Hone at the other.

The Lambs’ was also the place where the age of Johnson met the age of Dickens and Browning in its embryonic state, and for Crabb Robinson this was its great charm. Robinson knew that the two great ‘beasts’ in the Lamb menagerie would not be there tonight, but he was seeing Wordsworth for breakfast in the morning, and in some ways it was easier when he was not there, less high-minded and, somehow – Robinson hated to let anything cloud his admiration of the man he recognised as the greatest poet since Milton – less constrained by the presence and dues of genius.

Coleridge was away too, in Wiltshire, writing – or at least talking, as only Coleridge could talk – and Hunt would be busy at the Examiner’s office deep into the night; but so long as there could be one evening without Hazlitt and talk of Bonaparte, Robinson did not mind who else was there. He was painfully conscious that he got the worst of an argument with Hazlitt over the whist tables the last time they had met, and for a barrister it was doubly galling to be bested by a man ‘who was not just wrong but offensive in almost all he said’. ‘When pressed he does not deny what is bad in the character of Buonaparte,’ he had confided to his diary that night, part in anger, part in sadness at their parting of ways, ‘and yet he triumphs and rejoices in the late events. Hazlitt and myself once felt alike on politics, and now our hopes and fears are directly opposed. Hazlitt is angry with the friends of liberty for weakening their strength by going with the common foe against Buonaparte … Hazlitt says: “Let the enemy of old tyrannical governments triumph, I am glad, and I do not much care how the new government turns out … His hatred, and my fears, predominate and absorb all weaker impressions.”’

There seemed to be no one, in fact, that Hazlitt had not offended these last weeks – Charles Burney over the review of his sister Fanny’s latest novel, Wordsworth with his attack in last week’s Examiner, Hunt who had been forced to disown the article – but not even Hazlitt could spoil the pleasure Robinson always felt as he made his way up the steep flights of stairs to the Lambs’ chambers. He was probably too late now to take a hand of whist but after the recent hash he had made of his cards that was probably no bad thing, and it was only deep into the evening, when they were done with cards and the tables put away, and the drink had begun to do its work, that the place came fully alive in all its strange, unruly charm.

The Lambs’ Temple garret was a warren of small, shabby rooms under the roof and two sitting rooms on the third floor below. Charles Lamb had set aside the smaller of the rooms for a library so grimy that Robinson could never bring himself to go in, but the ‘state room’ would be looking as it always did for one of their soirées, with their old, petted servant Becky loading the sideboards with food and porter, while Mary glided in her quiet, measured way among the party and Charles – his hair, as black at forty as at twenty, the one grey and one brown eye already bright with fun and battle – sat like some diminutive, half-tipsy Quaker under the low, smoke-stained ceiling among his Hogarth prints, with his forbidden brandy and forbidden tobacco, and talked and stammered and joked and punned and drank to keep at bay the demons that no talk could hold off for ever.

Even by Charles Lamb’s standards, Robinson thought, they were an odd lot that evening: old Burney talking whist as if he had never watched Captain Cook being murdered or abandoned his wife for his sister; the poet Charles Lloyd, holding on to his sanity by the slenderest of threads; the ageing ’90s radical George Dyer, in the same rusty, threadbare suit of black, the same dirty yellowed wisp of muslin around his throat, the same trousers that stopped short of his ankles and the same battered shoes that he had been wearing when Lamb had first seen him in the library at Christ’s Hospital thirty years before. But as Robinson made his way among the old familiar faces there was one man he found himself watching with an interest that had more curiosity in it than he would have cared to admit.

The stranger had been buttonholed by Lamb, who was bent on securing his interest for another old Christ’s Hospital friend, an epileptic clerk in the Temple with a wife and four children who had fallen on hard times, but for once it was not Lamb who held Robinson’s interest. He knew who Basil Montagu was of course – everyone at the Bar did – and he knew the story of his mother’s killing, but to see him here in the flesh, the refined and almost effeminate image of his father, old Lord Sandwich, was like watching one of Lamb’s Hogarths come to life and Medmenham Monk turn Methodist preacher to denounce the vices of his youth.

Circumstances had combined, in fact, to make Basil Montagu – the illegitimate son of a notorious aristocratic rake and an opera singer murdered by a rival lover – more interesting than a reforming barrister with a specialist practice in bankruptcy had any business being. Montagu had been only nine when his mother’s clergyman-murderer was hanged at Tyburn in front of the biggest crowd since the clergyman-forger Dr Dodd, and his life since had been in miniature the movement of the age itself, an ascent – or descent, depending on your politics – from aristocratic bastard through Jacobin revolutionary and Coleridgean Romantic to Benthamite reformer, teetotalling vegetarianism and a gradualist faith in the slow triumph of liberal parliamentary reform.

As much as Byron or Prinny, or any of the more flamboyant arbiters of the age, Montagu embodied the spirit of a Regency England caught between a past it was trying to escape and a future that stubbornly refused to be born. There remained something of the ancien régime about him that Robinson did not quite like, but as Basil Montagu stood there among the smoke and fumes of Lamb’s chambers, talking confidently of the inevitable triumph of reform, exchanging tales of life on the Norfolk circuit and offering his copy of ‘Bentham on Evidence’, Robinson was looking at the past and listening to the future.

It would be a long night at the Lambs’, and as midnight approached and old Captain Burney – the apostolic link with the world of Johnson, Boswell, Reynolds and ‘The Club’ – talked cards, and Mary smoothed ruffled feathers, and Charles took poor, gullible George Dyer aside to explain in confidence that he had it on the best authority that Lord Castlereagh was the mysterious author of Waverley, 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.

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