The Story of Marengo—Napoléon’s Horse

Zoë Sharp

Recently on the news there have been a lot of pictures of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, mounted on an eye-catching white horse, riding through snow up the sacred Mount Paektu, the highest mountain in the country.

Kim Jung-un and grey horse on sacred mountain

It struck me when I saw those pictures that there was something vaguely familiar about them. It didn’t take long to recall why. Back when I was a horse-mad small child (and indeed, a horse mad NOT-so-small child) I had a wonderful book about famous horses through history. One of them was a small grey Arabian stallion, Marengo, who belonged to the Emperor Napoléon I of France.

Bonaparte crossing the Great St Bernard pass in the Alps,
painted by Jacques-Louis David

Napoléon apparently once told an artist who inquired how he’d like to be portrayed, “Paint me calm, on a spirited horse.”

It is said that the Emperor owned 130-150 horses during his career, but the most famous of these is probably Marengo.

Napoléon Bonaparte was noted for liking small, agile horses although it is said that he was not a particularly skilled horseman. He was raised modestly on the island of Corsica, and did not learn to ride until beginning his military career. He had joined the artillery and was serving as an officer when Revolution broke out in France in 1789. Capitalising on the opportunities provided by the Revolution, he climbed the ranks very rapidly—he was a general by the time he was twenty-four.

Marengo was small for a war horse—only 14.1 h.h. (1.45m). He was apparently bred at the El Naseri stud and was imported into France from Co Cork in Ireland before being acquired by Bonaparte as a six-year-old in 1799.

Arab horses are noted for their stamina, speed and courageous nature. Marengo was no exception. He carried Bonaparte safely through numerous battles, including Marengo in Italy in 1800—Bonaparte named the horse after his victory here.

Some reports claim the pair would go on through Austerlitz in Moravia, Jena-Auerstedt in Prussia, Wagram in Austria and finally to Waterloo, although whether Bonaparte rode the same horse throughout this time, or a series of horses, is unclear. After all, by the time of Waterloo in 1815, the original Marengo would have been twenty-two—a good age for a horse in a far more sedentary occupation.

By this time, though, the sight of a spirited grey Arab horse, ridden by the figure in the bicorn hat and plain grey overcoat, had become part of Bonaparte’s legend. Although the village of Spinetta Marengo in northern Italy was already well-known for producing cloth in a dark brown colour with white speckles, after the battle it became synonymous with a grey or black fabric shot through with white or pale grey thread, as popularised by Bonaparte.

After his defeat at Waterloo, Bonaparte was forced to leave the wounded Marengo behind and escape by carriage. It was reported that the horse was found by Lt Henry Petre, 11th Baron Petre, who recognised the emperor’s saddlery and the imperial brand on the horse’s flank of an N topped by a crown.

Petre nursed the horse back to health and shipped him to London. When his career as a spoil of war was over, Petre sold the stallion to William Angerstein, a wealthy Grenadier Guards officer.

Angerstein put the horse unsuccessfully to stud, then retired him. Marengo finally died in 1832, when the original horse would have been thirty-eight. Angerstein then had his skeleton reconstructed by surgeons and it is now on display at the National Army Museum. The horse’s two front hooves were retained, however, and turned into ornamental snuff boxes. Another was used as an inkwell. His skin was put aside to be stuffed but was apparently lost.

This week’s Word of the Week is donnybrook, which comes from the annual Fair held in Donnybrook, which was then a suburb of Dublin. The Fair was noted for the consumption of alcohol and the number of both fights and hasty marriages that took place during it. In the end, the Donnybrook Fair was abolished in 1855. The name for a general ruckus remains.

Upcoming Events

Not long until Furness LitFest next month. (Wow, is Christmas creeping up on us, or what?) Helen Phifer and I will be taking part in Thriller Writers Talk With Margaret Martindale, starting 9:30 am on Sat, Nov 02 at the Dalton Community Centre on Nelson Street in Dalton-in-Furness. Tickets available from the website.

Constantia revisted

Michael - Thursday

If you notice some similarity between this post and an earlier one, then all I can say is that you have a very good memory. It overlaps the first blog I posted in 2009. Partly because not many memories are that good, partly because it leads into next weeks post (about Bonaparte, but not the one mentioned here), and partly because tomorrow is the absolute deadline for the fifth rewrite of our book, I thought it was worth resurrecting.

In 1652 Jan van Riebeeck landed at what became the Cape of Good Hope with the aim of providing fresh produce for ships of the Dutch East India Company on the way to and from the Indies.  Ostensibly because wine was supposed to help scurvy but perhaps for a quiet tipple on the side, he planted the first vineyard three years later.  And on the 2^nd of February 1659, he was able to proclaim: “Today, praise be to God, wine was pressed from Cape grapes for the first time”.  By all accounts the wine was pretty foul - not too surprising given the level of expertise around. The Netherlands is not renowned for her wine.

But van Riebeeck was succeeded twenty years later by Simon van der Stel, an interesting if contentious character, who did know about wine and saw the opportunity for a guilder or two to come his way also.  He was the son of Adriaan van der Stel and Maria Lievens, the daughter of a freed Indian slave woman, which made him “coloured” in the racial parlance of the apartheid government.  (Needless to say this was not a feature emphasized in the school history text books of the day.)

The Cape peninsular has a climate not too different from that of southern Europe with winter rainfall and moderate temperatures.  It's the area of South Africa which most reminds people of the Continent with gnarled oak lined streets and the genteel plants that thrive in the “old country”. Van der Stel carefully selected a wine farm for himself along the southern slopes of the Cape peninsular, actually testing the soils and choosing a cool microclimate with winds from the sea.  He called the estate Constantia and did very well.

But the wines that made Constantia famous came later when Hendrik Cloete moved from
Stellenbosch (named after van der Stel) and bought a portion of the Constantia estate.  He planted new vines and specialised in a wine made from grapes ripened almost to raisins on the vine, matured in vats, and fortified.  The wine was called simply Constantia and it held its own with all the choice sweet wines with the rich and famous of the day.  All this came to an end late in the nineteenth century when phylloxera devastated the vineyards.  Still, a few bottles survive to this day.  A wine-writer friend of mine was fortunate to taste one some years ago and pronounced it still luscious after two hundred years.

A famous story about Constantia is that it was one of Napoleon's favourite wines and he received a regular supply to cheer him up on Saint Helena - an island off the west coast of Africa to which he was exiled the second time after Elba couldn't hold him. A juicy twist was that the British used the wine to kill him with small doses of arsenic poisoning, but if arsenic was involved, it was more likely to have been from the glue in the wall paper. The modern consensus seems to be that he died of stomach cancer and that spoils the tale altogether.

In 1980 a new estate named Klein Constantia (part of the original van der Stel estate) decided to try to recreate the wine.  It was to be a sweet desert wine in the late harvest style – not botrytis – with the berries hand-selected.  The venture was a stunning success and celebrated in the name – Vin de Constance – and in copies of the old Constantia hand-made bottles which the estate uses for the modern wine.  It's available outside South Africa – a friend in Australia has a good selection of vintages, and I've had a bottle in a restaurant in New York.  If you like dessert wines, this one is worth trying if you have the chance.  

You can imagine you're sharing the bottle with Bismark or Napoleon or King George... It will set you back more than a few dollars though. The wine has become something of a collectors item.