The war drama of the Eagles

by Edward Fraser

THEY DID NOT MEET AT TALAVERA

At Talavera, the 8th, as part of a brigade of three regiments, had a passage of arms on the battlefield, first with the British 83rd; and then with the Guards; lastly with the 48th, before whose magnificent charge in the final phase of the fight they had to give ground. They did not meet the 87th Royal Irish Fusiliers at all in the battle.[26]

CHAPTER IX
OTHER EAGLES IN ENGLAND FROM BATTLEFIELDS OF SPAIN

Napoleon’s Eagles made a second appearance before the London populace in the following year. That was on September 30, 1812, and the Horse Guards Parade was again the scene of the display—this time with more elaborate ceremonial, and with the added presence of yet greater personages. Queen Charlotte herself this time witnessed the reception ceremony, with four of the Princesses; and the Prince Regent in person, “mounted on a white charger,” attended, to be publicly done obeisance to by the humbled standards of the enemy. Four of his Royal brothers, the Dukes of Clarence, York, Cambridge, and Sussex, accompanied the Prince Regent. Only the poor old King, blind and insane, was absent of the Royal family, remaining in his seclusion at Windsor Castle.

The Queen and Princesses watched the scene from the windows of the Levée Room at the Horse Guards, looking down over the Parade; the Prince Regent was on the ground and took the salute. The Eagles this time were five in number; and four French flags, one of exceptional interest, the garrison-standard of Badajoz, were with them in the procession.

The military display was on the grandest scale possible; the ensemble making up, as we are told, “a spectacle grand and impressive beyond anything ever beheld.” The First and Second Life Guards were present, “drawn up in a line reaching from the Foreign Office nearly to Carlton House,” with their bands in State dress and their standards. All three regiments of Foot Guards took part, with the State Colour of the First Guards, and three bands. Horse and Foot Artillery from Woolwich were also there; forming by themselves one side of the great hollow square which occupied the wide space of the ground, the scene of the reception of “the Eagle with the Golden Wreath.” Ninety grenadiers, drawn from the three regiments of Foot Guards, thirty from each, formed the trophy-escort, which, as before, accompanied the Eagles and captured standards round the square at a slow march—the five Eagles in advance by themselves, borne by as many Guards’ sergeants between files of grenadiers with fixed bayonets.

THE EAGLES ARE HUMBLED AGAIN

Again the trophies of Napoleon were spared nothing in the humiliation that they had to undergo. Twice were they lowered to the dust before the Queen; twice to the Prince Regent; eight times before the standards of the Life Guards; three times before the standards of the Guards and the King’s Colour of the First Guards, “the immense concourse of spectators rending the air with their huzzas” every time the trophies went down. Then, as before, the trophies were paraded across Whitehall to the Chapel Royal, and solemnly “churched” and hung up there, before the Royal family and “all the Cabinet Ministers and the leading members of the nobility in London.”

They were this time all Wellington’s trophies. Two of the Eagles were spoils from the battle of Salamanca—“dreadfully mutilated and disfigured in the conflict,” according to a newspaper reporter’s account, “one of them having lost its head, part of the neck, one leg, half the thunderbolt, and the distinctive number; the other without one leg and the thunderbolt.” Two had been taken in Madrid “in more perfect state and without their flags.” The last of the five had been “found on the way to Ciudad Rodrigo, in the bed of a river, dried up in summer, having been thrown away some months before during Masséna’s retreat.” The four Eagles which still bore distinctive numbers were, we are told, “those of the 22nd, 13th, and 51st and the 39th.” Of the standards, the garrison flag of Badajoz looked “like a sieve, a great part of it quite red with human blood”; the four other colours “were so mutilated that not a letter or device was legible.”

How we came by the trophies so displayed in London on that Wednesday forenoon is our story.