‘History isn’t about commemoration or glorification, it’s about explanation.’
IT wasn’t just Eve Myles’ yellow mac that caught the eye in Keeping Faith – the portrait of Sir Thomas Picton, resplendent in his military togs, loomed large in the scenes filmed in Carmarthen Courthouse.
He has a statue in Cardiff City Hall – one of the “Heroes of Wales” in its Marble Hall.
He has a Blue Plaque in Haverfordwest. He has roads, pubs and even a school named in his honour.
Indeed, there are probably more memorials to Thomas Picton in Wales than there are of Welsh women per se. But that’s what you get when you’re a posh chap who expired in a blaze of glory at the Battle of Waterloo.
Picton was the most senior British officer to die in the fight against Napoleon. And he remains the only Welshman to be buried at St Paul’s Cathedral – within a few feet of Wellington’s tomb.
But a blog published by the National Library of Wales Archives this week reminds us that the flipside of his military heroism was a vicious and violent streak that saw him oversee the torture of a teenage girl.
Death in the cause of king and country killed off the scandal of Picton’s blood-soaked reign as governor of Trinidad. Referencing the National Library’s historical Welsh Print Collection – a soon-to-be-digitised compendium of 2,000 historical biographies – Dr Douglas Jones writes: “One of the hidden histories we recently discovered in the collection was that of Sir Thomas Picton and the torture of Louisa Calderon.”
Thomas Picton is now mainly remembered for his exploits during the Peninsular War and for being the highest-ranking officer killed at Waterloo. However, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, following his time as governor of Trinidad, he had a much darker reputation.
“Picton’s governorship of Trinidad was authoritarian and brutal and led to his trial at the King’s Bench in 1806 accused of ordering the judicial torture of Louisa Calderon. Calderon was a 14-year old Mulatto girl, accused of being involved in the theft of money from a Port of Spain businessman, Pedro Ruiz, whom Louisa’s mother had arranged for her to live with as a ‘mistress’ at age 11.”
The trial was a cause célèbre at the time and is recounted in detail in The Trial of Governor T. Picton for Inflicting the Torture of Louisa Calderon… published in 1806.
“Unable to get a confession through interrogation, Picton had issued the order to ‘Inflict the torture on Louisa Calderon’, who was subsequently subjected to piqueting, which at trial William Garrow, the prosecutor, dubbed ‘Pictoning’.”
This was an excruciating punishment. The young girl was suspended by one arm on a pulley rope set in the ceiling and lowered onto a spike in the floor, bare foot first.
This continued until her entire body weight rested on the spike.
Louisa must have been a remarkable 14-year-old. As Dr Jones explains: “She did not confess and was imprisoned for a further eight months before being released.
“Picton admitted ordering the torture, but claimed that it was legal under the Spanish law still being administered in Trinidad at the time, despite the island being under British rule.”
He protested to the court that the girl was “a common Mulatto prostitute, of the vilest class and most corrupt morals”.
But as historian Chris Evans points out: “Picton’s outrage was more than a little synthetic – his own household in Trinidad had been presided over by a mulatto mistress who bore him four children.”
Although the jury found him guilty, Picton was never sentenced. The decision was partially reversed at a retrial in 1808.
This was not the only stain on his autocratic governorship in the colonies. Picton was also accused of the execution of a dozen slaves. And the trade in captive humans was partly behind his considerable fortune.
Before his arrival in Trinidad, the colony was known for its indiscipline. Picton’s dictatorship changed everything, as Chris Evans explains: “He set about dispensing a brand of justice that was seldom tempered by mercy. The island’s population was cowed by a wave of exemplary executions.
“As for the growing numbers of forced African labourers, they were subjected to a slave code of Picton’s
own design.
“Delinquents who were sent for immediate execution might consider themselves lucky; others had to endure mutilation and torture.
“Picton’s new regime was vicious but it brought striking results.
“Sugar exports totalled 8.4 million lb in 1799. By 1802 they were 14.2 million lb.”
But wasn’t Picton a product of his times? Well, actually we shouldn’t worry too much about applying 21stcentury values to the actions of a man in the early years of the 19th century.
Even in his own era, Picton’s treatment of Louisa Calderon was considered by many as repellent. It was a huge scandal which divided the public.
“The case became a sensation at the time and shone a light on the brutal realities of the British colonial system and indirectly of colonial slavery,” writes Dr Jones.
And Picton wasn’t particularly lauded for his character in military circles. “I found him a rough, foulmouthed devil as ever lived,” was Wellington’s verdict.
But he was no coward on the battlefield.
When the Member for Pembroke boroughs was plucked from his Carmarthenshire estate to take up arms once more in 1815, death at Waterloo sealed his war-hero status for the next 200 years.
Not that his worthiness to be so ubiquitously commemorated in Wales hasn’t been questioned.
In 2011, solicitor Kate Williams called for his courthouse portrait to be removed.
She told the BBC at the time: “After hearing that he was alleged to have tortured a slave girl I felt that it was inappropriate to have his picture in a modern court of law where we are supposed to represent the principles of equality and justice for all.
“I accept that he is a person of note from this area but put him in a museum. I think people might misread the prominence of the picture as saying he has done something worth while to contribute towards justice, which really isn’t the case.”
Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service said it was simply accommodating the artwork on behalf of Carmarthenshire Museum.
At the time, Ann Dorset, from the museum, said the portrait had been painted specifically to hang in the building and that was where it should remain.
“I think we have to accept Picton warts and all and not judge him by today’s standards,” she said.
But do we still have to accept yesterday’s standards of who is a hero? Can’t we move on from 19th-century choices of who should adorn our public spaces for posterity?
By accepting such decisions decades, even centuries later, we are in danger of implicitly endorsing some seriously dubious deeds.
From the Rhodes Must Fall campaign to America’s division over the call to remove Confederate statues to Bristol’s discussions over renaming Colston Hall, it’s a debate that has gathered momentum in recent years.
Men of stone whose reputations have crumbled have been knocked off their plinths.
Canada has confronted its colonial past. In 1749, the city of Halifax’s founder, British military officer Edward Cornwallis, offered rewards for ethnic cleansing – in February his bronze was removed.
Last month New York tore down the statue of controversial 19th-century gynaecologist J. Marion Sims less than a day after it was deemed unsuitable for its iconic spot in Central Park.
Sims – once hailed as “the father of gynaecology” – conducted many of his medical experiments on enslaved black women without anaesthesia.
Last week the city of Pittsburgh removed a statue criticised as racist for decades – a 118-year-old bronze of songwriter Stephen Foster and a barefoot black man playing banjo at his feet. This isn’t erasing history. Or re-writing it. Or sanitising it.
History isn’t about commemoration or glorification, it’s about explanation. Statues of controversial figures can be moved to more appropriate locations, like museums, where full context can be given.
If they stay in situ then let’s add plaques that give the whole story.
Does Thomas Picton really deserve to rub his marble shoulders with the likes of Hywel Dda, Dafydd ap Gwilym and Owain Glyndwr in Cardiff City Hall’s heroes’ pantheon – a roll-call, incidentally, that was voted for by Western Mail readers?
I’d happily see him removed and replaced by a remarkable Welsh woman.
Among all those marble men, Boudica has been pretty short of female company since 1916.
Or if Picton stays, let the story of the girl whose torture he ordered be told alongside him.
For as Dr Douglas Jones ends his blog on hidden histories: “Despite the focus placed on her at the time, Louisa Calderon largely disappeared from the historical record, although she is believed to have returned to Trinidad in 1808 and according to one source died in poverty in June 1825.”