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Tag Archives: Hundred Days


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Birth of Arthur O’Connor, United Irishman

Arthur O’Connor, a United Irishman who is active in seeking allies for the Irish cause in England, is born near Bandon, County Cork, on July 4, 1763.

O’Connor is born into a wealthy Irish Protestant family. Through his brother Roger O’Connor, the author of the Chronicles of Eri who shares his politics, he is an uncle to Roderic O’Connor, Francisco Burdett O’Connor, and Feargus O’Connor among others. His other two brothers, Daniel and Robert, are pro-British loyalists.

As a young man, O’Connor embraces the Republican movement early on as he is encouraged by the American Revolution overseas. After his oldest brother Daniel gets into debt, his brother Roger buys out his inheritance. The family’s political and financial conflicts are only deepened when their sister Anne commits suicide, after having been forbidden by the family from marrying a Catholic man she was in love with.

From 1790 to 1795 O’Connor is a Member of Parliament in the Irish House of Commons for Philipstown. The Irish House of Commons is part of the colonial parliament that sits in College Green, Dublin. He is also a member of the Kildare Street Club in Dublin.

In 1796, O’Connor joins the Society of United Irishmen and determines, on its platform, to contest what had been his uncle Lord Longueville’s Irish parliamentary seat in Antrim. In January 1797, to the “free electors” of the county he commends the “entire abolition of religious distinctions” and the “establishment of a National Government,” while protesting the “invasion” of the country by English and Scottish troops and the continuation of the continental war. Arrests, including his own in February for seditious libel, frustrate his attempts to canvass. With Lord Edward FitzGerald and others in the leadership in Dublin his thoughts turn to securing “fraternal” French support for a revolutionary insurrection.

While traveling to France in March 1798, O’Connor is arrested alongside Father James Coigly, a Catholic priest, and two other United Irishmen, Benjamin Binns (also of the London Corresponding Society), and John Allen. Coigly, who is found to be carrying an clear evidence of treason, an address from “The Secret Committee of England” to the French Directory, is hanged. O’Connor, able to call Charles James Fox, Francis Rawdon-Hastings, the Earl of Moria, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and other Whig luminaries to testify to his character, is acquitted but is immediately re-arrested and imprisoned at Fort George in Scotland along with his brother Roger.

O’Connor is released in 1802 under the condition of “banishment,” He travels to Paris, where he is regarded as the accredited representative of the United Irishmen by Napoleon who, in February 1804, appoints him General of Division in the French army. General Louis-Alexandre Berthier, Minister of War, directs that O’Connor is to join the expeditionary army intended for the invasion of Ireland at Brest. When the plan falls through, O’Connor retires from the army.

In 1807, although more than twice her age, O’Connor marries Alexandrine Louise Sophie de Caritat de Condorcet, known as Eliza, the daughter of the scholar the Marquis de Condorcet and Sophie de Condorcet. Following his marriage he borrows money from fellow exile William Putnam McCabe to acquire a country residence. His tardiness in repaying the debt to McCabe, whose own investments into cotton spinning in Rouen had failed, results in a lawsuit. Cathal O’Bryne suggests that the debt is behind O’Connor’s later suggestion to Richard Robert Madden that McCabe had been a double agent, a charge to which, Madden notes, the French government lends no credence.

O’Connor offers his services to Napoleon during the Hundred Days. After Napoleon’s defeat he is allowed to retire, becoming a naturalised French citizen in 1818. He supports the 1830 revolution which creates the July Monarchy, publishing a defence of events in the form of an open letter to General Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette. After the revolution he becomes mayor of Le Bignon-Mirabeau. The rest of his life is spent composing literary works on political and social topics. He and his wife continue the efforts of her mother, who is herself an accomplished translator of Thomas Paine and Adam Smith, to publish her father’s works in twelve volumes between 1847 and 1849.

O’Connor’s wife give birth to five children, three sons and two daughters, almost all of whom predecease him. Only one son, Daniel, marries and has issue. Daniel marries Ernestine Duval du Fraville, a daughter of Laurent-Martin Duval, Baron Duval du Fraville, in 1843. She dies at Cannes in 1877.

O’Connor dies on April 25, 1852. His widow dies in 1859.

O’Connor’s descendants continue to serve as officers in the French army and still reside at Château Dubignon. Through his only surviving son, Daniel, he is a grandfather of two boys, Arthur O’Connor (1844–1909), who serves in the French army, and Fernand O’Connor (1847–1905), a Brigade General who serves in Africa and is made a Knight of the Legion of Honour. His grandson, Arthur, marries Marguerite de Ganay (1859–1940), a daughter of Emily and Etienne, Marquis de Ganay, in 1878. They have two daughters, Elisabeth O’Connor, the wife of Alexandre de La Taulotte, and Brigitte Emilie Fernande O’Connor (1880–1948), who in 1904 marries the Comte François de La Tour du Pin (1878–1914), who is killed ten years later at the First Battle of the Marne.


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The Battle of Waterloo

battle-of-waterlooThe Battle of Waterloo is fought on Sunday, June 18, 1815 near Waterloo, Belgium, which is part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands at the time. The battle marks the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

A French army under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte is defeated by British forces under the command of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington of Dublin and a Prussian army under the command of Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher. The Iron Duke is not the only Irish presence on the battlefield that day. Napoleon’s horse, Marengo, is reared in County Wexford, and the Duke of Wellington’s mount is from County Cork.

Upon Napoleon’s return to power in March 1815, many states that have opposed him form the Seventh Coalition and begin to mobilise armies. Wellington and Blücher’s armies are cantoned close to the northeastern border of France. Napoleon chooses to attack them separately in the hope of destroying them before they can join in a coordinated invasion of France with other members of the coalition. On June 16, he successfully attacks the bulk of the Prussian army at the Battle of Ligny with his main force, while a portion of the French army simultaneously attacks the Anglo-allied army at the Battle of Quatre Bras. Despite holding his ground at Quatre Bras, the defeat of the Prussians forces Wellington to withdraw north to Waterloo on June 17. Napoleon sends a third of his forces to pursue the Prussians, who have withdrawn parallel to Wellington in good order. This results in the separate and simultaneous Battle of Wavre with the Prussian rear-guard.

Upon learning that the Prussian army is able to support him, Wellington decides to offer battle on the Mont-Saint-Jean escarpment across the Brussels road. Here he withstands repeated attacks by the French throughout the afternoon of June 18, aided by the progressively arriving Prussians. In the evening, Napoleon commits his last reserves, the senior battalions of the French Imperial Guard infantry. The desperate final attack of the Guard is narrowly beaten back. With the Prussians breaking through on the French right flank, Wellington’s Anglo-allied army counter-attacks in the centre, and the French army is routed.

Waterloo is the decisive engagement of the Waterloo Campaign and Napoleon’s last. Napoleon abdicates four days later, and coalition forces enter Paris on July 7. The defeat at Waterloo ends Napoleon’s rule as Emperor of the French and marks the end of his Hundred Days return from exile. This ends the First French Empire and sets a chronological milestone between serial European wars and decades of relative peace.

The battlefield is located in the municipalities of Braine-l’Alleud and Lasne, about 15 kilometres south of Brussels, and about 2 kilometres from the town of Waterloo. The site of the battlefield today is dominated by the monument of the Lion’s Mound, constructed from earth taken from the battlefield itself. The topography of the battlefield near the mound has not been preserved.


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Death of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington

Field Marshal Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, Anglo-Irish soldier and statesman who was one of the leading military and political figures of 19th-century Britain, dies on September 14, 1852. His defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 puts him in the first rank of Britain’s military heroes.

Wellesley is born in Dublin, into the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. He is commissioned as an ensign in the British Army in 1787, serving in Ireland as aide-de-camp to two successive Lords Lieutenant of Ireland. He is also elected as a Member of Parliament in the Irish House of Commons. He is a colonel by 1796, and sees action in the Netherlands and in India, where he fights in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War at the Siege of Seringapatam. He is appointed governor of Seringapatam and Mysore in 1799 and, as a newly appointed major-general, wins a decisive victory over the Maratha Confederacy at the Battle of Assaye in 1803.

Wellesley rises to prominence as a general during the Peninsular War of the Napoleonic Wars, and is promoted to the rank of field marshal after leading the allied forces to victory against the First French Empire at the Battle of Vitoria in 1813. Following Napoleon’s exile in 1814, he serves as the ambassador to France and is granted a dukedom. During the Hundred Days in 1815, he commands the allied army which, together with a Prussian army under Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, defeats Napoleon at Waterloo. Wellesley’s battle record is exemplary and he ultimately participates in some 60 battles during the course of his military career.

Wellesley is famous for his adaptive defensive style of warfare, resulting in several victories against numerically superior forces while minimising his own losses. He is regarded as one of the greatest defensive commanders of all time, and many of his tactics and battle plans are still studied in military academies around the world.

After the end of his active military career, Wellesley returns to politics. He is British prime minister as part of the Tory party from 1828 to 1830, and for a little less than a month in 1834. He oversees the passage of the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829, but opposes the Reform Act 1832. He continues as one of the leading figures in the House of Lords until his retirement and remains Commander-in-Chief of the British Army until his death.

Wellesley dies at Walmer Castle in Deal, Kent, his residence as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, on September 14, 1852. He is found to be unwell on that morning and is aided from his military campaign bed, the same one he used throughout his historic military career, and seated in his chair where he dies. His death is recorded as being due to the aftereffects of a stroke culminating in a series of seizures.

Although in life Wellesley hates travelling by rail, his body is taken by train to London, where he is given a state funeral, one of only a handful of British subjects to be honoured in that way, and the last heraldic state funeral to be held in Britain. The funeral takes place on November 18, 1852. He is buried in a sarcophagus of luxulyanite in St. Paul’s Cathedral next to Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson.