Witnessing Waterloo: 24 Hours, 48 Lives, A World Forever Changed
A sweeping political, social, military and cultural overview of the United Kingdom on the eve, and then the day, of the greatest battle fought by British arms.Midnight, Sunday, 17 June 1815. There was no town in England that had not sent its soldiers, hardly a household that was not holding its breath, not a family, as Byron put it, that would escape ‘havoc’s tender mercies’ at Waterloo, and yet at the same time life inevitably went on as normal.As Wellington’s rain-sodden army retreated for the final, decisive battle, men and women in England were still going to the theatre and science lectures, still working in the fields and the factories, still reading and writing books and sermons, still painting their pictures and sitting in front of Lord Elgin’s marbles as if almost five thousand did not already lie dead. After ten hours of savage fighting, Waterloo would be littered with the bodies of something like 47,000 dead and wounded. Meanwhile, as the day unfolded, a whole nation, countryside and town, artisan and aristocrat, was brought together by war.From Samuel Johnson Prize shortlisted author David Crane, Went the Day Well is a breathtaking portrait of Britain in those moments. Moving from England to the battle and back again this vivid, stunning freeze-frame of a country on the single most celebrated day in its modern history shows Crane’s full range in tracing the endless, overlapping connections between people’s lives. From private tragedies, disappointed political hopes, and public discontents to grandiloquent public celebrations and monuments, it answers Wellington’s call as he rallied his troops to ‘Think what England is thinking of us now’.
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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
12 noon: Ah, You Don’t Know Macdonell
1 p.m.: Never Such a Period as This
4 p.m.: The Finger of Providence
Went the day well?
We died and never knew.
But, well or ill,
Freedom, we died for you.
John Maxwell Edmonds
‘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
