Purely by chance, just as I was putting the finishing touches to my new novel called "Conspiracy of Angels", I came across the furore on the BBC and in the other media (in November 2011) about the status and reputation of Sir Thomas Picton, who figures very prominently in the story.
He was one of Wellington’s closest lieutenants in the Battle of Waterloo, and the most senior officer to be killed in the battle, on 18th June 1815. (It's often claimed that he was Wellington's second-in-command, but that appears not to be true.)
Although he did enter parliament for a while, Sir Thomas was never given a peerage, and after his death he was not accorded the respect of a burial in St Paul's Cathedral. He was, eventually, given a memorial plaque in the cathedral. Wellington obviously disliked him intensely, and following his death his praise was decidedly lukewarm. The Duke was not very supportive of the idea that Picton should be treated as a national hero. However, he was without doubt a very effective tactician and leader of men, and Wellington obviously valued him as a soldier who could be trusted to deliver on the battlefield. He was uncultured, foul-mouthed, and short tempered, and was clearly very different in temperament from many of the other army officers of the time, who more often than not came from the ranks of the gentry. If his men adored him, his fellow officers obviously did not.
Sir Thomas made his military reputation in the West Indies, where he was eventually appointed Governor of Trinidad -- which had been annexed by the British from Spain. As Governor, he ruled with a rod of iron on the principle of “Let them hate me, as long as they fear me.” He was sadistic and brutal, and used torture and summary executions without trial as a matter of course, to maintain peace on the slave plantations and in the mixed population of free people of mixed races, in which the white settlers were very much in the minority. He claimed that everything he did was in the national interest and was designed for the upkeep of law and order, but a buildup of resentment against his brutal and sadistic regime came to a head when he authorized the torture of a mulatto girl called Louisa Calderon, who was either 13 or 11 years old at the time. She was tortured by a method called “picketing” -- so as to obtain a confession from her. She was tortured on two successive days, and then imprisoned in irons for a further 8 months. Picton was recalled to Britain and prosecuted, and in a famous court case in 1806 he had to face the wrath of William Garrow, the most famous barrister of the day (as seen on BBC TV!), charged with the torture of a free child. Garrow used rather salacious images of the torture process and showed them to the jury -- this was a very innovative thing for a prosecuting counsel to do during a court case, and it had the desired effect. He also renamed "picketing" and called it "pictoning" instead -- again with great effect. Picton was found guilty, but powerful allies (including many plantation owners) rallied to his cause and obtained a retrial, at which he was acquitted on the technicality that although the British were in charge on the island, Spanish law still applied! That was of course ludicrous, and Picton’s reputation was destroyed.........
Later on he sought to redeem himself through service to his country, and by invitation from Wellington, he resumed his military career, being closely involved in the campaign against Napoleon in Spain and Portugal. But liberal opinion in Britain never forgave him, and for the last few years of his life he was something of a social outcast.
In Trinidad, and in many other places as well, Picton is reviled. He is seen as a brutal thug who should never have held high office, let alone honoured in place names in Wales and on the island which he terrorised. And yet streets and even the Sir Thomas Picton Secondary School in Haverfordwest are named after him, and of course there is the impressive Picton Monument in Carmarthen....... So one might ask with some justification whether his achievements on the battlefield were sufficient for him to be accorded this level of respect. There is a portrait of him in the Carmarthen court room, and some people who have a real respect for our principles of justice (including Carmarthen solicitor Kate Williams) want that portrait removed, in the light of the fact that in his lifetime he applied summary justice, terrorised a whole community, and showed a cavalier disregard for the law. The campaigners have a powerful point.
Others have argued that we should not seek to revisit history and seek to impose present-day values on those who held office a couple of hundred years ago. I disagree with them. History is full of good men, who used the powers given to them with sensitivity and grace; and history is also full of men who were sadistic monsters, obsessed with their own power and seemingly incapable of recognizing the suffering of others. In this case the word "sociopath" comes to mind. I suspect that if Sir Thomas had been alive today, he would have been called a sociopath, since he displayed --as far as we can gather -- a callous unconcern for the feelings of others, a gross and persistent attitude of irresponsibility and disregard for social norms, difficulty in maintaining enduring relationships, a tendency towards irritability and aggression, an incapacity to experience guilt for the pain he inflicted on others, and a desire always to blame others or to rationalize away aspects of his own behaviour that brought him into conflict with those who sought to uphold the law and to create a harmonious society.
So in spite of the furious reaction from the right-wing press over the matter of "the Carmarthen portrait", I would argue that we should not expect our national heroes to be paragons of virtue, but neither should we be prepared to gloss over the evil done by deeply flawed leaders to their fellow men. Sir Thomas has been given too much unquestioning respect in the past, even by some of our leading historians who should know better. I'm not sure that we should name schools and colleges after tyrants like Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi and Mussolini. Time for Sir Thomas Picton School to give itself a new name?
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