From prince to pauper: a dramatic overview of Britain on 18 June 1815

Of all the big battalions of books marking the bicentenary of the battle of Waterloo that have come my way, this has to be the best. David Crane has used the bloody campaign as a telescope, bringing into sharp focus not just the carnage along the Brussels road, but the state of Britain itself: a country on the cusp of vast, irreversible change.

He achieves this within the compass of a single summer’s day — Sunday, 18 June 1815 — devoting a chapter to each hour and cutting cinematically between the three armies slaughtering each other in Belgium and the citizens at home. Some anxiously await news of triumph or disaster; others are utterly oblivious of what the cannonade rolling across the Channel, clearly heard by Kentish churchgoers, portends.

The result is a rich feast of a book: dramatic, poignant, funny, gruesome and tragic by turns. Crane selects a small cast to people his narrative, and involves us in their destinies without ever losing sight of the bigger picture. He persuasively argues that Waterloo was not only the bloodiest European struggle of the 19th century; it was also the watershed event which killed the old country — rural, hierarchical, devout, reactionary and inward-looking — and ushered in a new nation — urban, industrial, sceptical, expansionist and
forward-looking.

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The characters whose stories he tells range from Wellington himself to Eliza Fenning, a kitchen maid awaiting execution in the fetid hellhole of London’s Newgate prison for the crime — which she may or may not have committed — of attempting to poison her employers with a dish of dumplings laced with arsenic.

The Iron Duke emerges with flecks of rust on his otherwise stainless-steel reputation. He doubted the quality of the motley bag of a multinational army he commanded, and nervously awaited the arrival of the Prussians to make his victory sure.