15 June

The ball before the cannon balls flew

1815 The most famous ball in literature was that thrown (historically) in Brussels, on this day, the eve of what would be the Battle of Waterloo. It was given by the Duchess of Richmond for her son. The event was first immortalised in Canto III of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:

There was a sound of revelry by night,

And Belgium’s capital had gathered then

Her Beauty and her Chivalry, and bright

The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men;

A thousand hearts beat happily; and when

Music arose with its voluptuous swell,

Soft eyes look’d love to eyes which spake again,

And all went merry as a marriage-bell;

But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes like a rising knell!

What is the deep sound? Not the wind, but the cannon’s roar.

In his 1843 novel, Charles O’Malley, the Irish novelist Charles Lever made the ball the centre-piece of his picaresque hero’s career (in which, preposterously, he ends up advising both Wellington and Napoleon on how to conduct their battle). More temperately (and deliberately aiming his account against Lever, with whom he had differences), Thackeray makes the ball (the most glamorous such event ‘since the days of Darius’) central to his ‘Waterloo Novel’, Vanity Fair (1847–8). Other novelists (Georgette Heyer, Bernard Cornwell, creator of ‘Sharpe’) have featured it.

These commemorations are well known and much cited. Less well known is the career of the young man for whom the duchess threw the ball – who was also a novelist. Lord William Lennox (1799–1881) was the fourth son of the fourth Duke of Richmond. His godfather was William Pitt and one of his cousins was Charles James Fox.

While still a thirteen-year-old boy at Westminster School, William was gazetted to a cornetcy. He then joined Wellington’s staff as an aide-de-camp, remaining in that post until three years after Waterloo. He missed the battle itself, although he made the ball.

Lennox sold his commission in 1829 and served as a Whig MP over the Reform years. He was always more interested in horses than Parliament. He went on to write extensively for the journals of the day and turned out a number of fashionable novels. There was a taste for what was called ‘silver forkery’ – particularly if penned by actual bluebloods. None was bluer than that of the author of Compton Audley (1841), The Tuft Hunter (1864), The Adventures of a Man of Family (1864) and ten other effusions lying, undisturbed, in the vaults of the British copyright libraries. In his later life, a sadly broken-down figure, Lennox hired himself out for lectures on the theme of ‘Celebrities I have known’. They, alas, no longer knew him as they had on that glorious night in June 1815.