A plain dark cloak still streaked with mud from the battle of Waterloo – which the Duke of Wellington is said to have draped around the shoulders of Lady Caroline Lamb when he was one of the most famous, and she one of the most infamous people in Europe – is to be sold for the first time in 200 years.
The victor of Waterloo and the tempestuous aristocrat, who was once served up naked in a silver dish at a dinner, had a brief fling in Brussels in the weeks after the battle on 18 June 1815 which changed the course of European history and ended Napoléon Bonaparte’s power forever.
Both were married, but notorious for a string of affairs: a different Sotheby’s sale next month includes a portrait of the Iron Duke by a French artist, given in the same period to another society mistress, Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster. Her husband was subsequently talked out of suing Wellington, and later fought a duel after horsewhipping another of her lovers in St James’s Street in London.
Wellington and Lamb had met in London but came across each other again in Brussels, when she was nursing her brother who had been injured in the battle. Lamb, nicknamed the Sprite, was widely regarded as still being half-deranged by the breakup of her most famous affair, with the poet Lord Byron. After that split she had slashed her arms, stalked Byron in public, broken into his home disguised as a pageboy, and in 1816 published a thinly disguised account of the affair in her novel Glenarvon.
In a letter included in the auction, another society lady in Brussels commented acidly of Lamb’s arrival to minister to her brother: “The surgeon told her the best thing she could do would be to hold her tongue.”
Their affair may have been little more than a one-night stand, but Wellington is said to have given Lamb the dark blue velvet-collared campaign cloak as a souvenir of the battle. The duke was painted by artists including Goya in gold-braided scarlet uniform jackets, but preferred plain, dark, soberly cut clothes, including the cloaks shown in several portraits.
The Iron Duke gave another cloak to a friend, last recorded in 1824 and also claimed as a battlefield relic, but since he also commented that one cloak was as good as another, he may not himself have been sure which one he wore on the day.
Lamb clearly didn’t keep the cloak for long. The connection was noted by Grosvenor Charles Bedford, a civil servant who was given the garment in May 1823. He recorded in his diary that he was shown around the Hunterian collection of medical specimens at the Royal College of Surgeons by the surgeon Anthony Carlisle. “We dined with him afterwards, and he presented me with the cloak worn by the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo, and in Spanish campaigns. It was given to Sir AC by Lady Caroline Lamb, who had received it from the Duke.”
Lamb died in 1828, four years after Byron. Wellington went on to serve terms as foreign and home secretaries and as prime minister twice. He died in 1852 shrugging off scandal over his liaisons, immortally telling Harriette Wilson, a former mistress who tried to blackmail him over inclusion in her memoirs, “publish and be damned”.
The cloak has been in Bedford’s family ever since, and will go on public display for the first time before the 14 July auction, where it is estimated it will sell for up to £30,000.
The auction includes a watercolour by JMW Turner of the Waterloo battlefield, with an estimated value of up to £250,000.
Turner toured the battlefield in 1817, when it had already become a major tourist attraction. His sketches of the scene, many held by the Tate, include intricate details of the landscape, and notes of how many men died at different sites.
The watercolour in the auction, The Field of Waterloo from the Picton Tree, with scattered human and animal bone fragments in the foreground, was painted in 1833 and engraved as a frontispiece for Sir Walter Scott’s Life of Napoleon.
• This article was amended on 18 June 2015. An earlier version referred incorrectly to “the poet Alfred Lord Byron”.
