Now! Then! Tag: Napoleonic Wars (1803-15)

Entries for the tag ‘Napoleonic Wars (1803-15)’

A series of conflicts fought between the First French Empire under Napoleon (1804-15) and a fluctuating array of European coalitions, which originated in political forces arising from the French Revolution (1789-99) and from the French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802), and produced a period of French domination over Continental Europe.

16 February 1789: Thomas Paine writes to Thomas Jefferson telling of the “revolutionary” iron bridge being built to his design by the Walkers of Masbrough (Rotherham)
23 May 1793: The 14th Foot, predecessor of the West Yorkshire Regiment, chant a French Revolutionary song as they storm enemy trenches at Famars (Valenciennes)
15 August 1805: The Sheffield volunteer infantry depart to fight Napoleon on the beaches, which one man thinks might be in the Peak District
4 May 1807: Lord Milton welcomes 10,000 to his 21st birthday barbecue at Wentworth Woodhouse, Rotherham, during his campaign to be elected MP for the Whigs
25 June 1808: Dr Campbell, lodging above a chandler’s on Leeds Kirkgate, advertises the results of his treatment of anorexia, Napoleonic wounds, and all other known illnesses
28 July 1809: The Napoleonic career of Richard Beckett of the Coldstream Guards, Meanwood (Leeds), and the MCC, who fell today at Talavera (Toledo)
26 September 1810: Anthony Brown of Bowling (Bradford) is detained for swindling the Otley parents of Wellington’s men
17 February 1812: Leeds businessmen meeting at the magistrates court act against the authors of the first successful Luddite attack in Yorkshire, at the Oates, Wood, and Smithson works at Oatlands, Woodhouse Carr
7 April 1812: Sheffield cemetery builders and metal-workers riot on market day against potato price inflation
28 April 1812: Methodist Luddites fatally wound the textile manufacturer William Horsfall on his way home from Huddersfield market
19 May 1812: An Anglican Whit walk encounters a Nonconformist one at “Briarfield” (Birstall), amid Luddites and wars with France and the US, in the imagination of Charlotte Brontë
18 August 1812: Lady Ludd leads bread rioters through the streets of Leeds
4 January 1813: Alexander Thomson, Baron of the Exchequer, fires the Georgian state’s opening salvo in the great trial at York of Luddites from the West Riding
1 August 1813: The 51st Foot wear bay leaves, not white roses, on Minden (now Yorkshire) Day, as they drive the French back over the Pyrenees
3 December 1816: A revolutionary bread riot is averted at Sheffield
10 November 1817: Though organised Luddism is in decline, a gig-mill burns on Hunslet Lane, Leeds
17 May 1823: “Doncaster fertiliser manufacturers imported more than a million bushels of skeletons from Waterloo and other Napoleonic battlefields in 1822”
19 August 1849: The last bull-baiting at Lydgate Wakes, Saddleworth
15 September 1872: Death of “York’s last Waterloo hero”

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