The Battle of Waterloo: Napoleon's Final Defeat and the Leg That Became a Tourist Attraction

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Collage of Waterloo battlefield, Henry Paget portrait, and his prosthetic leg inset; title text about Napoleon's final defeat.

On the evening of 18 June 1815, Henry Paget was having his leg sawn off above the knee in a Belgian farmhouse, without anaesthetic, and his main contribution to the proceedings was a joke about his love life. He'd spent forty-seven years as one of Britain's most 'celebrated' womanisers, he said with a smile, and now that he'd lost the leg, perhaps it was only fair to step aside and let the younger men have their turn. His pulse, according to the doctor performing the amputation, was as steady as if he'd just woken from a night's sleep. It was, in its way, a perfect summary of the man: composed to a degree that was almost unsettling, possessed of an irony that didn't desert him even under a saw.

The Battle of Waterloo was the event that put Paget in that farmhouse. It was also the battle that ended Napoleon Bonaparte's career, terminated twenty-three years of almost continuous European warfare, and reshaped the political map of a continent. The leg is one of the odder footnotes. It got its own tombstone.

Napoleon's Return and the Race to Belgium

Napoleon had been sent into exile on the island of Elba in 1814, after the first defeat of the French empire by the Seventh Coalition. He escaped in March 1815 and marched back to Paris, where the army he'd once commanded largely defected back to him on the spot. Europe, which had just spent years trying to be rid of him, scrambled to mobilise again. The period that followed is known as the Hundred Days.

The nearest allied forces were the Duke of Wellington's Anglo-allied army and a Prussian army under Field Marshal Blücher, both concentrated in what is now Belgium. Together they outnumbered Napoleon. His only realistic hope was to strike before they could combine: destroy one army, then turn on the other. On 15 June he crossed the Belgian frontier and drove a wedge between them. Two days later, at the Battle of Ligny, he defeated Blücher's Prussians and sent them retreating north. That same day, Wellington held off a French attack at Quatre Bras. Both allied armies were still intact, but separated. Napoleon now turned his full attention to Wellington.

Wellington fell back to a defensive ridge at Mont-Saint-Jean, just south of the village of Waterloo. He knew the Prussians were regrouping and had Blücher's personal promise that they'd march to support him. His plan was characteristically unglamorous: hold the ridge until they arrived. Napoleon had 72,000 men and 246 guns. Wellington had 68,000, an army that was, in his own words, a 'infamous army' of mixed experience and questionable reliability. He needed the Prussians.

18 June: The Battle

Napoleon delayed his opening attack until late morning on 18 June, waiting for the waterlogged ground from the previous night's rain to dry enough that his artillery rounds would bounce forward through the allied lines rather than bury themselves in mud. That delay, a few hours, would prove significant.

The battle opened with a French assault on the fortified farmhouse of Hougoumont on Wellington's right, intended as a diversion to draw allied reserves. Wellington reinforced it. Hougoumont held for the entire day. At around 1:30pm, Napoleon unleashed his main effort: the massed infantry of D'Erlon's I Corps, some 15,000 men, advancing in column against Wellington's left centre. General Picton led 4,000 British troops forward to meet them and was killed in the process.

It was at this moment that Henry Paget, commanding 13,000 allied cavalry and 44 guns of horse artillery, ordered the charge that effectively saved Wellington's line.

Henry Paget: The Man Wellington Disliked and Needed

The relationship between Henry Paget, Earl of Uxbridge, and the Duke of Wellington was complicated even before they were thrown together at Waterloo. Paget was one of the most flamboyant figures of the Regency era, and six years earlier he had eloped with Lady Charlotte Wellesley, the wife of Wellington's brother Henry. The scandal was considerable. A duel followed between Paget and Lady Charlotte's brother; both men fired and missed, and honour was technically satisfied, but Wellington never quite forgave the insult to his family. When Paget was appointed his second-in-command for the Waterloo campaign, the Duke did not receive the news warmly.

None of that was visible on 18 June. As D'Erlon's columns threatened to shatter Wellington's centre, Paget launched 2,000 heavy cavalrymen of the Household Brigade and the Union Brigade in a devastating countercharge. The Scots Greys went in shouting 'Scotland forever.' The French infantry, advancing in column, had no time to form defensive squares. D'Erlon's entire corps was swept from the field in minutes, and two French eagle standards were captured in the chaos. It was one of the most spectacular cavalry charges in British military history, though it came with a significant cost: the cavalry, carried away by the momentum, charged too far, ran onto the French gun line, and were cut to pieces by Napoleon's counterattacking lancers. Paget couldn't stop them.

He spent the rest of the afternoon leading a series of light cavalry charges to steady the line and had eight or nine horses shot from under him over the course of the day. By early evening, the French had assaulted Wellington's squares with massed cavalry and been repulsed. The farmhouse of La Haye Sainte, at the centre of Wellington's position, had fallen, briefly threatening to split his line in two. Then the Prussians arrived.

Blücher's army, having marched through mud all day from Wavre, hit Napoleon's right flank in force in the late afternoon. Napoleon committed the Imperial Guard, his elite reserve, in a final all-or-nothing assault on Wellington's centre. The Guard advanced uphill in the fading light and was met at close range by Maitland's Guards Brigade rising from the reverse slope and delivering a volley that stopped them cold. The Guard broke. The shout went around the French army: 'La Garde recule!' The Guard was retreating. Within minutes the entire French army was in rout.

By God, Sir, I've Lost My Leg

One of the last French cannon shots of the day, fired in the general collapse, hit Paget in the right knee as he rode alongside Wellington. According to the most widely repeated version of what followed, he turned to the Duke and said, 'By God, sir, I've lost my leg!' Wellington glanced down and replied, 'By God, sir, so you have!'

Whether the exchange happened exactly that way is debated. The diary of J. W. Croker, written three years later in 1818 from a conversation with Horace Seymour, the man who carried Paget from the field, records a slightly different version: Paget said 'I have got it at last,' and Wellington replied, 'No? Have you, by God?' The polished, symmetrical version passed into legend. The rougher, more plausible one was written down closer to the event. Either way, Paget had not actually lost the leg at that point; it was still attached, though badly shattered. He was lifted from his horse and carried back to the village of Waterloo.

The Farmhouse and the Surgeon's Saw

Paget was taken to Maison Tremblant, a house at 214, Chaussée de Bruxelles, in Waterloo, owned by a Frenchman named Hyacinthe Joseph-Marie Paris. This was Paget's designated headquarters for the day. Deputy Inspector of Medical Staff John Robert Hume examined the wound: a piece of case shot had entered just below the kneecap, torn open the joint capsule, and destroyed the knee entirely. There was no question about what had to happen next.

Hume went out to find additional surgeons, wanting the amputation to be done with witnesses so that no one could later question whether it had been strictly necessary. He could find no staff surgeon, but collected several artillery surgeons who accompanied him back into the house. For the operation itself, Hume borrowed a knife from one of them, since his own had already seen extensive use that day.

Paget was seated in a wooden chair for the procedure. Hume later described the scene: 'His lordship was perfectly cool, his pulse was calm and regular, as if he had just risen from his bed in the morning, and he displayed no expression of uneasiness though his suffering must have been extreme.' There was no anaesthetic. Hume made his incision, retracted the flesh on both sides, and reached for the saw.

Glove and saw used in the amputation of Paget's leg

At one point during the sawing, the assistant holding the leg lifted it slightly out of position, jamming the blade. Hume, without knowing the cause, said irritably, 'Damn the saw.' Paget lifted his head from the pillow and asked, with a smile, 'What is the matter?' He had been sitting through an unaided amputation, and his comment was mild curiosity about a minor technical difficulty. According to another account, his only remark about the procedure itself was that 'the knives appear somewhat blunt.' Afterwards, when told that his leg had needed to come off, he reportedly said, 'Who would not lose a leg for such a victory?'

Shortly after the surgery, Paget sent a request to his senior cavalry colleague Sir Hussey Vivian. He'd heard from some of those present that the leg might not have needed to be amputated after all, and he wanted an honest second opinion. Vivian went and examined the detached limb. He reported back that it was, in his assessment, 'completely spoiled for work.' Paget accepted this and seems to have been satisfied.

The Leg With Its Own Tombstone

M. Paris, the owner of Maison Tremblant, asked Paget whether he might keep the amputated leg. Paget saw no further use for it and agreed. Paris placed it in a small wooden coffin and buried it under a willow tree in his garden, marking the spot with a tombstone that read:

'Here lies the Leg of the illustrious and valiant Earl Uxbridge, Lieutenant-General of His Britannic Majesty, Commander in Chief of the English, Belgian and Dutch cavalry, wounded on the 18 June 1815 at the memorable battle of Waterloo, who, by his heroism, assisted in the triumph of the cause of mankind, gloriously decided by the resounding victory of the said day.'

Paris then turned the whole arrangement into a paying attraction. Visitors were first shown the bloody wooden chair on which Paget had sat during the amputation, then escorted into the garden to view the tombstone. The operation had been profitable in every sense. Among the distinguished visitors who came to pay their respects to the leg were the King of Prussia and the Prince of Orange. The Prince Regent reportedly wept almost uncontrollably when he read the inscription. Not everyone was as moved: a wag carved a second verse beneath the official epitaph, reading: 'Here lies the Marquis of Anglesey's limb; The Devil will have the remainder of him.'

Most remarkably, Paget himself returned to visit. According to the London Review of Books account drawing on contemporary sources, he insisted on dining at the table in Maison Tremblant that Paris had carefully preserved in its blood-stained state from the night of the operation. There is something either deeply stoical or faintly surreal about a man choosing to eat dinner at the table where his own leg had been cut off, but by all accounts Paget considered it the appropriate thing to do. It's the kind of unbothered relationship with bodily catastrophe that appears repeatedly in British military history, but rarely quite so literally.

The Diplomatic Row and the Furnace

The leg business generated income for the Paris family for decades. In 1878, however, things took a turn. Paget's son, by then the 2nd Marquess of Anglesey, visited Maison Tremblant and found that the bones were no longer buried. A storm had brought down the willow tree, exposing the remains. Rather than rebury them quietly, the Paris family had put them on open display and was charging visitors to see them.

The 2nd Marquess demanded the bones be returned to England. The Paris family refused, and offered instead to sell them back to the Paget family at what was described as a rather hefty price. The Pagets were outraged and declined. The row escalated to involve the Belgian ambassador in London, who took the matter to the Belgian Minister of Justice, who ordered the Paris family to rebury the bones. They technically complied: the bones were removed from public display, but were not actually reinterred. They were kept hidden in the Paris family home.

The story ended in 1934, when the last Monsieur Paris died. His widow, clearing out his study, found the bones. She put them in the central heating furnace. That was the end of the leg.

One of Paget's legs on display in Plas Newydd

Paget After Waterloo

Five days after the battle, the Prince Regent elevated Paget to the Marquessate of Anglesey and appointed him a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath. He declined an annual pension of £1,200 offered in compensation for the loss of his limb. He was fitted with a state-of-the-art prosthetic leg made by James Potts of Chelsea, with articulated knee and ankle joints and raising toes, operated by catgut tendons. The design was so advanced over anything previously available that Potts patented it under the name the 'Anglesey leg,' and it became the standard pattern for prosthetic limbs for decades afterwards.

Paget lived until 1854, dying at the age of 86, thirty-nine years after Waterloo. He served twice as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and twice as Master-General of the Ordnance, eventually becoming a Field Marshal and Knight of the Garter. He was known thereafter simply as One-Leg. Napoleon, who had set the whole day in motion, spent the rest of his life in exile on Saint Helena, and died there in 1821.

Wellington, asked for his feelings after the battle, said: 'Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.' He and Paget had exchanged perhaps the most famous lines to come out of the whole affair, though whether they actually said them in the manner recorded is something historians have been arguing about ever since. That ambiguity, too, feels appropriate.