I’m so pleased about Waterloo...but you RUINED my party!
HISTORY WATERLOO MESSENGER: THE LIFE OF HENRY PERCY by William mahon (Pen and Sword £25)
THERE is a plaque on a building in St James’s Square in London that captures my imagination every time I read it.
It is outside the house where, on Wednesday, June 21, 1815, a wealthy socialite, Mrs Edmund Boehm, was giving ‘a soiree’ attended by the 52-year - old Prince Regent, later King George IV.
At some point in the evening , there was a commotion outside. The Honourable Major Henry Percy, of the 14th Light Dragoons, had arrived with a pair of French Imperial Eagles captured three days earlier on the Belgian battlefield of Waterloo. Declaring ‘ V ictory, victory, sire’, P ercy laid them before the Prince, symbols of the epic defeat of Napoleon’s army.
Percy was a trusted aide - decamp to the Duke of Wellington. The night before the battle, he had attended a ball in Brussels, wearing his scarlet dress tunic. There was no time to change when news arrived that Napoleon was approaching from the south, so P ercy was still in his party gear after the battle, when the Duke charged him with the mighty responsibility of carrying word of the triumph back to London.
In our own age of instantly accessible news, the image of a single soldier travelling for more than two days to deliver news of a seismic military victory is a beguilingly romantic one. And to make it even more romantic, Percy still had in his pocket a crimson velvet sachet, given to him by an unknown woman he had danced with at the ball.
The plaque in St James’s Square tells us that P ercy first delivered the official dispatch to the P rime Minister, the Earl of Liverpool, then continued on to see the Prince Regent.
But I have often wanted to know more about the events of that doubtless tumultuous evening. Colonel Sir W illiam Mahon’s meticulously researched book fills in all the gaps.
For Wellington at Waterloo, the victory was not immediate cause for celebration: he had lost too many fine officers and good friends. Unable to sleep, he stayed up most of the night, writing his official report for the government.
He also had to decide who would deliver it. W ith several of the other contenders either injured or dead, the obvious choice was P ercy, whose social and military credentials were impeccable. His father was the Earl of Beverley; his grandfather had been the first Duke of Northumberland.
He was an experienced career soldier who had once been taken prisoner by the French (and, while captive, fathered two ille - gitimate children). Moreover, he was a fit young man, not yet 30.
Early the following morning Percy set off by carriage from Brussels for Ostend, where he was able to quash the rapidly spreading rumour that the French, not the British, had been victorious at Waterloo.
A warship, HMS P eruvian, set sail for Kent at about 2pm, but there was little or no wind, and the 75-mile crossing took more than 24 hours. I t was the next afternoon before Percy, increasingly anxious at the time it was taking to get to London, landed at Broadstairs. There, he climbed into a carriage, but the captured French eagles and standards were too long to fit inside, so they stuck out of the window, to the delight of crowds which gathered every time the carriage stopped for fresh horsepower. The worrying rumours of a Napoleonic victory had reached England, too, so at the four stops — Canterbury, Sittingbourne, Rochester and Dartford — there was frenzied excitement. By the time Percy reached London, a cheering and ever-burgeoning crowd ran after his carriage. He went to Downing Street to deliver the dispatch first, as W ellington had com - manded, to the Secretary of State for War, Earl Bathurst. But — and here is a detail of this story that I really cherish — Bathurst wasn’t in. He and the Prime Minister were dining at the home of Lord Harrowby in Grosvenor Square. So poor P ercy, dishevelled and exhausted, had to clamber back into his carriage and carry on. He practically fell through the door at 44 Grosvenor Square, crying: ‘ Victory, victory . Bonaparte has been beaten!’ After the P rime Minister and others had quizzed him, P ercy went on to the Boehms’ house at 16 St James’s Square.
FOR
Dorothy Boehm, the evening was meant to be her greatest social triumph, but as the orchestra was about to strike up, guests were suddenly distracted: P ercy had arrived with his French eagles. Her carefully planned ball had been momentously upstaged.
Although the P rince Regent tried to make it up to his hostess by giving her an inscribed, gilded replica of P ercy’s battleground spoils, she remained inconsolable, ever after referring to ‘those horrid French eagles’.
As for Percy, he died, aged just 39, in April 1825. But more enduringly, P ercy died with a right to a footnote in history, and a plaque in St James’s Square.