Overall: 31cm (12.5in) x 50cm (19.6in)
Provenance: Haden Cooper, Esq.
Exhibited: Waterloo Exhibition, 1890
An original caricature of the Duke of Wellington made in the field at the time of the Battle of Waterloo and autograph letter and from the pen of the private secretary to Lord Uxbridge for Deputy Commissary General F.W. Hayden, estimating the casualties, announcing the amputation of Lord Uxbridge’s leg above the knee, the rout of the French, and, verso, the whereabouts of Wellington and Blucher, and details of captured senior French officers - Comte Loubau of VI Corps, Vandamme of III Corps, Cambrone [sic] ‘who broke his parole’ on Elba and was commanding the last carré of the Old Guard when called on to surrender, and the mercurial Lefebvre-Desnouettes. The latter had been a prisoner of Henry Paget (later Lord Uxbridge) in Spain in 1808, but had broken his parole and escaped while living in Cheltenham, an act which greatly offended British public opinion.
Framed with cuttings verso taken from the Waterloo Exhibition of 1890 held at Ashley Place, ‘two minutes walk’ from Victoria Station, London.
The recipient of the present letter, Francis William Haden, was a Peninsula veteran having served
there with the Commissariat Department between 1809 and 1814. Moreover from October to 1812 to April 1814 he was attached to Wellington’s headquarters. Commissariat officers were uniformed civilians, appointed by the Treasury but issued with letters of commission by the War Office. Haden’s rank at Waterloo, that of Deputy Commissary General, was the equivalent of Lieutenant-Colonel or Major