‘Sir Arthur’
On his appointment as commander of the Northern District, General Sir John Byng set about finding a suitable estate to lease within the region, from which he could breed and train racehorses while farming the land. The general alighted on Campsmount, an elegant house then in the ownership of the Cooke-Yarborough family, with a sizable estate in the southern part of the West Riding of Yorkshire, near the village of Campsall, about eight miles from Doncaster. The house, designed by the leading local architect John Carr, sat atop a steep rise with spectacular views across the surrounding fertile countryside. The general was extremely happy with his new situation, located as it was within easy distance of some of the best horse breeders and racecourses in England. Byng’s official headquarters, meanwhile, was at Pontefract. Neither venue, Campsmount or Pontefract, was particularly convenient for the trips across the Pennine Hills to Manchester which would be necessary when the military were called to assist in policing mass meetings. It was a journey which the Reverend William Hay, whose parish was also in this part of Yorkshire, was obliged to make regularly in his role as a magistrate.
Sir John shared his passion for horse racing with many local dignitaries, most notably the Earl of Fitzwilliam. The earl was a prominent Whig politician, Lord Lieutenant of the West Riding of Yorkshire and the owner of the palatial Wentworth Woodhouse near Rotherham. He had inherited this estate from his uncle, a fellow Whig (twice prime minister) and horse breeder, Charles Watson-Wentworth, second Marquess of Rockingham and owner of the legendary champion Whistlejacket, immortalized by George Stubbs in 1762.* Evidence that General Byng was quickly and fully immersed in the county’s horse-racing business appears in The Sporting Magazine or Monthly Calendar in 1834, in a report on the death of Humphrey Clinker, another famous racehorse that was bred by Lord Fitzwilliam and foaled in the year 1822. ‘Sir John Byng’, the article says, ‘at that period had the management of the late earl’s Racing Establishment.’1
In 1819 Byng was listed as a steward for the Spring Meeting at York, and then as one of the owners and trainers entering horses at the August Meeting, on Thursday 12th.2 His horse was the three-year-old colt Sir Arthur, presumably named after the Duke of Wellington, whose proud bloodline was listed as ‘by Sorcerer, out of Sheba’s Queen’. Among the other runners were Lord Scarbrough’s Black Prince, Lord Queensberry’s Fitz-Walton, Lord Milton’s Palmerin and a Mr Bamlett’s colt, forcefully named ‘Destruction, by Thunderbolt’.3
Sir John had every hope of attending the whole week of the York August Meeting, from Monday 9th to Saturday 14th, but, given the illustrious competition and the presence of the local aristocracy and gentry, he was particularly keen to see his horse run on the Thursday. The occasion also offered some royal glamour, as the Prince Regent’s recently widowed son-in-law Prince Leopold was expected to be there, escorted by Lord Fitzwilliam and the Archbishop of York.‡
The general was therefore greatly dismayed to learn, at a summit with the magistrates held in Manchester on 31 July, that a mass meeting of Manchester’s reformers was to take place at St Peter’s Field on Monday 9 August and that the magistrates expected him to be in attendance, as he had been in March 1817, co-ordinating the crowd control on St Peter’s Field itself and then patrolling the streets in the following days. This meant, obviously, that he would miss the first day’s racing. And, given that York was seventy miles away, it was unlikely that he would see Sir Arthur race on the Thursday. On 2 August Sir John wrote from Manchester to Henry Hobhouse, marked ‘private’: ‘I have been exerting myself all day in speaking to the select committee’; his advice to them was that they should not attend the mass meeting themselves. He told Hobhouse he had promised the magistrates that he would ‘start at a minutes [sic] notice upon hearing from them’, and that he would, of course, be present ‘if necessary’, but that it would be ‘particularly inconvenient, having been long engaged to go with Lord Fitzwilliam to York on that day for the Races’.4 It was around this time that Sir John decided to delegate on-the-spot military command of the Manchester meeting to someone else.
Lieutenant Colonel George Guy Carleton L’Estrange (b. 1776), known to his family as Guy, came from a solidly military family from Moystown, King’s County (now County Offaly), in Ireland. His cousin, Edmund, was in the 71st Regiment of Foot and his nephew, George, was in the 31st Regiment. By tradition, young men of the family were educated at the prestigious Westminster School in London. Guy had entered the army in 1798 and had commanded the second battalion of the 31st Foot at the Battle of Albuera on 16 May 1811. Under attack from French cavalry, Major L’Estrange devised a defensive manoeuvre known, from then on, as the ‘Albuera square’ and, because of his quick thinking, his troops were able to withstand the enemy onslaught.5 In fact, according to the colonel of the regiment, Lord Mulgrave, L’Estrange and his men had ‘arrested the successful progress of the enemy, and turned the tide of battle’.6 After the battle, Lord Wellington recommended him ‘in the strongest manner for promotion in some way or other’,7 and Lord Mulgrave confirmed his immediate promotion to brevet lieutenant colonel. ‘Never’, Mulgrave wrote to L’Estrange, ‘was rank more nobly achieved or more honourably borne. My praises can add nothing to the general applause which the conduct of the 31st and its leader on the glorious 16th of May have excited.’8
In 1812 Guy L’Estrange was confirmed in his promotion to lieutenant colonel (that is, given the associated pay) with the 26th Regiment of Foot stationed at Gibraltar. However, unwilling to miss the ‘winding up of the war’ after Napoleon Bonaparte’s first abdication in 1814, he and a friend found some good horses and proceeded to ride across Spain to France, arriving outside Toulouse where his old regiment, now including his nephew, was stationed. Guy was so popular that on his arrival, as George L’Estrange recalled, he was greeted by ‘a loud cheer’ and ‘the caps of every soldier in the regiment waving in the air over their heads’.9
Also present at Toulouse were Major Edwin Griffiths and Lieutenant Colonel Leighton Dalrymple of the 15th Hussars. Major Griffiths recalled the ecstatic celebrations at the abdication of Emperor Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy under Louis XVIII, brother of the executed King Louis XVI: ‘Thousands of Country People crowded each side of the road for a League before we reached Toulouse, and absolutely deafened us with acclamation so that we could hardly hear the thunder of Artillery and the Bells of the Churches.’ On arrival in the city, ‘Triumphal arches, the white & fleur de lys, crossed the streets every twenty paces, and windows and even the house tops were crowded full of ladies, waving handkerchiefs, clapping hands, & calling with all their might “Vive the Roi! Vive les Bourbons!”’10 George L’Estrange was appointed aide-de-camp to General Sir John Byng, at that time commander of the 31st, who, he recalls, ‘was not a man of very many words’.11
Guy officially returned to the 31st Regiment of Foot on 6 June 1815, by which date it was stationed in Malta. Sir John, meanwhile, was commanding the 2nd Brigade of Guards near Brussels, with the battle of Waterloo fast approaching. In 1817, Guy married Sarah Rawson of Nidd Hall, Yorkshire. The 31st Foot was recalled from Malta to England in 1818, its core troops stationed initially at Dover. In the summer of 1819, it was among the regiments being gathered for duty in the northwest of England, supporting the civil powers. Given their professional and personal connections, it was therefore natural for the general to turn to Lieutenant Colonel Guy L’Estrange for assistance with his diary conundrum. In fairness to both, L’Estrange, quick-thinking and intelligent even under the stress of battle, was more than capable of commanding professional troops in the established manoeuvres now commonly used to control civilian crowds.12
Besides, Sir John’s preparations were well advanced. He had gathered troops of cavalry from the 15th Hussars and 6th Dragoon Guards, who were now stationed within Manchester and in the towns around it, including Bolton, Oldham, Ashton, Preston and Blackburn. Infantry companies from the 31st and 88th Regiments were also in Manchester as well as Rochdale, Macclesfield and Warrington. The Cheshire Yeomanry, who had been mobilized during the Blanketeers’ march, were stationed at Stockport, Macclesfield, Altrincham and Knutsford. In addition, Sir John had requested from the Duke of Wellington, Master-General of the Ordnance, two six-pounder guns accompanied by a troop from the Royal Horse Artillery, and these had now arrived, commanded by Major Thomas Dyneley. In all there were over a thousand men in Manchester and the vicinity, mainly regulars – that is, professionals – under the direct command of General Byng and, on the ground, his trusted officers.13
The 15th Hussars had begun their journey to Manchester as early as 25 May, when the troops under the command of Major Skinner Hancox, Captain William Booth and Captain Frederick Charles Philips marched from Ipswich, and those commanded by Captain William Bellairs marched from Norwich. A further two troops were located at Preston and Blackburn, who were later ordered to Manchester.14 At Manchester, the regiment was quartered at Hulme Barracks, built in 1803. Just after their completion, Joseph Aston described the barracks as ‘built upon an uniform convenient plan… They are intended for dragoons; the stables are on each side of the yard, and over them are the apartments for the soldiers. The quarters of the officers are in an insulated building near the north end of the yard, which is capacious enough for most manoeuvres which are generally used in exercising a squadron of horse.’15
The commanding officer of the troops from the 15th who were readying themselves for the mass meeting on St Peter’s Field was Lieutenant Colonel Dalrymple. In addition to Major Hancox and Captains Booth, Philips and Bellairs, the officers included Captain John Whiteford, Captain Charles Carpenter, Lieutenant James McAlpine, Lieutenant Frederick Buckley and Lieutenant Charles Rutledge O’Donnell. Of these ten officers, five were proud recipients of the Waterloo Medal (Dalrymple, Hancox, Whiteford, Booth and Bellairs).
Among the junior lieutenants was William Jolliffe. He later recalled that the 15th had been stationed at Hulme Barracks since late June or early July and that it ‘was my first acquaintance with a large manufacturing population’.16 Jolliffe’s remark raises the interesting question of the military’s attitude to such duties, particularly those seasoned individuals who had known the heat and blood of battle and who now found themselves marshalling civilians, whose grievances they may or may not have understood or sympathized with. The reformers’ criticisms of the duration and expense – and even futility – of the Napoleonic Wars may not have endeared them to the men who had fought, been maimed and lost comrades during these two decades of conflict. One veteran corporal of the 15th declared: ‘No beings on earth are subjected like the military to the whims and caprices of their countrymen. On ordinary occasions they are looked upon as little better than wastrils [sic], useless, and a burthen to the nation; their room [absence] more acceptable than their company.’ However, in ‘cases of emergency and dread of civil outrages, they are petted from the soles of their feet upwards; and all ideas of the “invasion of ancient privileges” vanish.’17 Rudyard Kipling pinpointed these contradictory attitudes in his 1890 poem ‘Tommy’:
For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ Chuck him out, the brute!
But it’s ‘Saviour of ’is country’ when the guns begin to shoot;
An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;
An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool – you bet that Tommy sees!18
Such writings convey a sense of two separate worlds, regarding each other with mutual suspicion and even animosity, or, at best, weary resignation. What might happen if these civil and military opposites were to collide?
The creation of Hussar regiments in the British army had resulted from the Prince of Wales’s association with French royalty and aristocracy in the years leading up to and following the French Revolution. The Marquis de Conflans, the colonel of a Hussar regiment in the French army, seems to have had a particular influence on the young George and, through this suave, dissolute and outlandish individual’s example, the future Prince Regent soon acquired a taste for the elaborate regimentals – and wild excesses – which distinguished French Hussar officers.19 The name comes from ancient Hungarian (or Magyar) tribes of marauding horsemen, whose wild ways their early-nineteenth-century spiritual descendants endeavoured to emulate. British Hussars, formed in the early 1800s out of the Light Dragoon regiments – characterized by their light weaponry and armour – were distinguished by their short dark-blue jackets heavily braided across the front (the 15th Hussars’ braiding was silver), the sabretache, a small red-and-gold bag hanging from the sword-belt, the stirrup-hilted curved sabre (1796 pattern) and the tall hat or ‘mirliton’. Officers wore a fur-lined pelisse, a short jacket, raffishly hanging from the left shoulder. As well as their exotic finery, the Hussars wore extravagant moustaches, in a period when wigs had become a rarity and gentlemen were invariably short-haired and clean-shaven: this was partly to appear unnervingly strange and ferocious, and partly to look older. Although the Hussar regiments had acquitted themselves well in battle, notably at Waterloo, the highest accolades at that signal victory had gone to the heavy cavalry with their captured imperial eagles and thousands of enemy prisoners. The relative poor showing from the dandy Hussars prompted rebukes in the press from fellow British cavalrymen:
Shave off those mustachios, let us see the honest countenances, that we may know our friends, and dress them once again in red, that their enemies may dread them. No man, be his rank or pretensions what they may, should be suffered to gratify his capricious fancy by any innovation on national dress… If our mustachio, whiskered, sheep-skins could not beat the other mustachio, whisker, bear-skinned fellows, it is evident these whimsical freaks do not answer.20
It would seem that the Hussars needed to prove themselves, in order to counter such criticism: as a matter both of regimental pride and of survival.
* The monumental painting originally hung at Wentworth Woodhouse, but is now in the National Gallery, London.
† Leopold arrived in York at 10.30 on the morning of Friday 13th, attended the racing in the afternoon, slept at the Black Swan Hotel and left for Northumberland on Saturday morning. The Yorkshire Gazette, on 14 August 1819, reported, ‘His Royal Highness was upon the Course in the afternoon during the running of the horses: and afterwards dined with his Grace the Archbishop, at his Palace… we understand [he] proceeds this morning on his road to Alnwick Castle.’ The Leeds Mercury of 21 August 1819 describes how Lord Fitzwilliam ‘introduced Prince Leopold to the Stand, in which were the Archbishop of York and his daughter, and many of the surrounding Nobility and Gentry’.