Monstrous Millinery

E.S. Turner

• British Military Spectacle: From the Napoleonic Wars through the Crimea by Scott Hughes Myerly
  Harvard, 336 pp, £23.50, December 1996, ISBN 0 674 08249 4

To be shot from one’s horse in battle was something of an honour, but to be blown from the saddle in a gust of wind at a review was not. This misfortune befell the Duke of Wellington in Hyde Park on a May day in 1829. Much of the blame lay with his Guards bearskin cap, nearly two feet high, which he was wearing instead of his usual cocked hat. ‘Oh, what a falling off was there!’ exclaimed the caricaturist Paul Pry, showing the Duke in his white trousers alighting on horse dung. But the diarist Creevey says the top-heavy hero was ‘immensely cheered’ by thousands. After all, lusty young troopers were sometimes unhorsed in this fashion.