A dandy at Waterloo

Byron Rogers

ONE LEG by the Marquess of Anglesey

Leo Cooper, £25, pp. 446

It seems he may not have said at Water- loo, 'By God, sir, I've lost my leg.' So the Duke of Wellington, lowering his telescope for a moment, may also not have said, 'By God, sir, so you have.' Ah well, it was ever thus. But what emerges from his great- great-grandson's revised biography is that Lord Uxbridge, the Duke's cavalry commander, might well have said it, for the eye-witness account is even more extraordi- nary.

At the amputation later that night his ADC recorded what happened as the sur- geons sawed away:

He said, smiling, 'I have had a pretty long run. I have been a beau these 47 years and it would not be fair to cut the young men out any longer', and then asked if we did not admire his vanity.

At that point Captain Wildman said he could not watch any more.

During his lifetime men felt the general was some kind of throwback. When he was passed over for a Cabinet post Lord Howard de Walden wrote, 'Is not this a signal piece of good fortune? Conceive "Kill 'em" in Cabinet! 'And when he died the Times wrote:

He belonged to a race of nobles who have passed away from amongst us; he was the last of the race . . . Your modern English peer is a sharp land agent, or a jocular, hair-splitting law lord.

The result is that, despite the present Lord Anglesey's great respect for his ances- tor, the comedy will keep coming through. As the young Lord Paget (there were to be four changes of name in that long life), he went on the Grand Tour with a gloomy tutor, acquiring VD and a little conversa- tional French heightened by a spell in a Swiss gaol.

His early private life was tangled. He seduced a duchess by blowing up the house in which they were staying:

Lord Paget, running upstairs, met the terrified Duchess in a state of unadorned loveliness, and securing her in his arms, carried her through the smoke to a snug corner of an adjacent hayloft, where he immediately took care to prevent the possibility of her taking cold by surrounding her with his own clothes.

He had a wife called 'Car' but left her for a mistress called 'Char'. The only thing was that Char was already married, and to the Duke of Wellington's brother, which meant that Paget-Uxbridge missed out on most of the Peninsular War (and pressure had to be brought on the Duke to have him at Waterloo). But the wooing of Char is a wonderful interlude of farce between all those cavalry charges which he led in person.

He was 40, and already the father of eight, when he met the heavily pregnant Char who had been advised to take up riding for her health. His ancestor, says Lard Anglesey glumly, had a spare horse. He also had the sperm count of a gerbil, and his final tally of 19 children living by both wives meant a diminishing patrimony (no funeral in England, it was thought, ever had so many immediate relatives following a man's coffin). There was much jumping in and out of shuttered coaches, and finally a duel.

It cost him, said Paget-Uxbridge, £20,000 for the first divorce, £10,000 for the second, and £1,000 a year in alimony. His aged father, meanwhile, who was unable to walk unaided, had fallen for a 20-year-old who was costing him £500 a year, and the author's detailed family accountancy is poignant. Yet somehow into all this Paget- Uxbridge-Anglesey managed to thread the war with Napoleon.

Perhaps the greatest military mystery of all is the British victory at Waterloo. On one side was the most professional officer corps the world had seen (General Picton said that, given a British army and French officers, he could have walked across Europe). On the other there were men like Paget, who had received no training of any sort.

He had gone to war, fresh from his Grand Tour and his exploded duchess, to command a regiment his father's money had raised; he was 26, and a colonel. He was also a fashion designer, having dreamt up his men's uniforms, and even before Waterloo, by then a veteran soldier, he still talked about uniforms the way women talked about their dresses, noted an old Spanish general.

There were many like him. One man bought his way into the 18th Hussars, went to the Peninsula with his hunters and grooms but then, after his first patrol, promptly went home, saying war was no occupation for a gentleman. But Paget stayed and saved an English army, when his screen of cavalry allowed Moore to fall back on Corunna. They could be hard as nails, these dandies, when they chose to be.

His moment of glory was the charge of the Blues and Greys, the heavy cavalry, at Waterloo, which smashed a French infantry corps. It was also something that haunted him for the rest of his life, for he had been unable to resist the temptation, though a lieutenant-general, of leading this in per- son. Had he stayed with his reserve, he wrote, then charged into the confusion with them, who knows what might have hap- pened? Like Rupert's charges, this one had got out of control and the cavalry suffered heavy casualties as they straggled back.

After that there were the years of pain, and of scratching about for honours and positions. He does not cut an attractive figure, this pushy Paget of the peace, pestering the King for the Order of the Garter, which of course he got.

So nothing prepares you for his next materialisation. At first you think it is the old Anglesey when he gets appointed Viceroy of Ireland, the Irish watching in wonder as the vast luggage was unloaded, 'one very long and large package marked "Cocked Hats" But what was landing with these was something new to them, a fair and broadminded man in charge of their affairs.

His old commander was stunned by Anglesey's conversion to the cause of Catholic Emancipation in a country, over five-sevenths Catholic, where every admin- istrative position was held by a Protestant. 'Lord Anglesey is gone mad,' wrote Wellington. 'He is bit by a mad Papist, or instigated by the love of popularity.' At this stage of their respective careers, 'Kill 'em' suddenly emerges as a more attractive and intelligent figure than the Duke, then PM, who finally sacked him.

They were reconciled in their later years, when they ran the British Army between them and went on tours of the south-coast defences, these two octogenarian field- marshals, the last living, riding into the sunset together.