Gordon book

46 The Gordon Book
civilians pressing forward into so hot a fight. They were the Duke of Richmond
and his two sons.
The latter were Lord William Pitt Lennox, aged sixteen, and Lord
Frederick Lennox, aged fourteen.
Mr. John Kent, in his Reminiscences of Goodivoorf, relates a remark-
able incident of the Duke of Richmond at Waterloo. The Inniskillings
were on the point of advancing across the Awarve Road to charge,
when an individual on the left in plain clothes called out " Now's your
time !" This was Richmond, who, though he held no rank in the army,
followed his old friend Wellington through all the dangers of the day,
and even rode into the squares of the infantry while under the fire of
the enemy. On the morning after Waterloo the Duke of Richmond
and Lord March rode over the field, and brought home a lot of trophies
from the field. Wellington's victory completely disproved the pessim-
ism of the Duchess of Richmond's mother, of whom Susan Ferrier, the
novelist, as quoted in Doyle's Memoir of her, wrote to a friend in
1 809 : —
We're first to die of famine in the winter ; and Bonaparte's to come and rob
us all the spring. So says the Duchess of Gordon, and it must be so, because,
she says, everything she has ever predicted has always come to pass.
The great Duchess, it may be remembered, tried to marry one of her
daughters to Napoleon's stepson, Eugene .Beauharnais. In the
winter of 181 5 the Duke gave a ball at the Elysee, in Paris, at
which Lady Georgiana Lennox was present. Thirty-eight years later
she was in that same ball-room, on the eve of Lord Raglan and his
staff's going to the Crimea. Lady de Ros used to give the veteran
Lord Albemarle (who fought as an ensign at Waterloo), a laurel leaf
every year in memory of Waterloo. In 1892 he took the laurel leaf to
the Military Tournament, and gave it to the young Duke of Albany,
who had come to see the old warrior. Albemarle's grandson, the Hon.
George Keppel, once served, it is interesting to remember, in the
Gordon Highlanders.