NO.119
T H E T R U S T Y S E RVA N T
Waterloo 200: ‘The Noblest Kind of Soldier’ Sir John Colborne, a Winchester Saint
Mark Romans, History don and
Housemaster of Beloe’s writes:
Every day Wykehamists walk past
Musa without sparing a glance at the busts
¯
in the four roundels over the loggia, yet
here the history of the College is literally
built into the brickwork. The sculptures
represent the spheres of intellectual
endeavour and public life through which
the men of the School might
repay the debt of a
Winchester education. The
four, in former days known as
‘the Winchester saints’, are
Grocyn for academe; Ken for
the Church; Selborne, the
Law; and Seaton, the
military life.
In many respects, Sir
John Colborne, first Baron
Seaton, was a model
Wykehamist; however, his
beginnings at Winchester
were far from auspicious. He
arrived in 1789 and was
enrolled as a Scholar in the
following year in VII Chamber. Here he
showed great independence of spirit, and
seems to have been heavily involved in
the Great Rebellion of 1793. While many
of his peers suffered expulsion following
those disturbances, Colborne was spared
and his star ascended as evidenced by his
dramatic advance up the Roll from 100th
out of 109 boys on his admission, to 11th
in 1793.
Nevertheless, Colborne left
Winchester in 1794, aged 16, to take up a
commission in the 20th Foot. In 1799 he
served in Holland, where he miraculously
survived being shot through the cap
twice, and was in the Mediterranean
between 1800-7, where he became a close
friend of Sir John Moore, the hero of the
battle of Corunna. Colborne was at
Moore’s bedside to witness his death and
one of the few present at his burial. The
war in the Iberian Peninsula found him at
the major engagements of Bussaco 1810,
Albuera 1811 (in which his brigade was
annihilated by Polish lancers), the siege of
Ciudad Rodrigo 1812 (where he suffered a
serious wound to the shoulder), and the
battles of the Pyrenees 1814.
It was at the battle of
Waterloo on 18th June 1815
that Colborne’s decisions
helped to tip the balance of
history. With the outcome
poised on a knife-edge as the
Imperial Guard neared the
British line, Colborne
exhibited what any don will
confirm to be the most
frustrating, but sometimes
the most endearing
Wykehamical trait – he acted
as he thought best without
waiting to be asked or told
what to do. The French
column had been halted by the British
guards, and by moving his regiment, the
52nd Light Infantry, on to their flank, his
troops opened up a destructive fire which
put them to rout. James Shaw-Kennedy,
one of Wellington’s aides-de-camp at the
battle later wrote: ‘no man can point out to
me any instance, either in ancient or
modern history, of a single battalion so
influencing the result of a great general
action as the result of the Battle of
Waterloo was influenced by the attack of
the 52nd Regiment on the Imperial Guard,
of which it defeated first four battalions
and afterwards three other battalions, and
Colborne did almost all this from his own
impulse and on his own responsibility.’
Colborne moved to a civil career
after the defeat of Napoleon and he used
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his appointments to promote his life-long
interest in education. As Lieutenant
Governor of Guernsey he oversaw the refoundation of Elizabeth College and
similarly as Lieutenant Governor of
Canada, he founded Upper Canada
College in 1830. It was in Canada that
Colborne found himself on the other side
of a rebellion and he was instrumental in
suppressing the risings of 1837 and 1838
with a minimum of bloodshed. For his
decisive and humane intervention, he was
created Baron Seaton in 1839.
Waterloo remained something of a
bittersweet memory for Colborne. The
Duke of Wellington did not mark him out
for special praise in his Waterloo
despatches and those who saw an
opportunity for scandal and profit tried to
push Colborne into advertising his claims
for greater recognition after the Duke’s
death in 1852. Colborne was too loyal
and modest a man to be flattered or
enticed into advancing himself at the
expense of Wellington and steadfastly
refused to be drawn into any publication
questioning the Duke’s account.
This self-abnegation was very much
the mark of the man. In 1889, Sir
William Fraser wrote of him:
‘Lord Seaton was certainly the
noblest type of soldier that I have ever
known…Mildest, kindest, gentlest of
human beings; clear-headed, calm and
vigorous in mind as he was strong in body,
he was always my idea of a soldier.’
Colborne’s qualities of unassuming
dedication and competence might still be
said to be the marks of an ideal
Wykehamist. For that reason, even more
than for his considerable achievements,
he deserves the occasional lift of the eye
as one passes on the way up to books. I