In an age of instant news, when an election result in the USA is available instantly on our phones, it’s hard to imagine a time when news of events even a hundred miles away could take weeks to reach Derbyshire. Before railways and national newspapers began to shrink distances a frequent source of information was the stagecoach, carrying the latest news from London. So on the 8th of July 1815, the people of Derby were finally sure that Napoleon had been decisively defeated at Waterloo when the Traveller Coach, one of the regular services from the capital, arrived in town. Celebrations were clearly called for, as the coach was decorated with laurels and lilies, and was pulling a French tricolor in the dust behind – a flag that was shortly burned by the crowd. So 20 days after the French defeat on June 18th the news began to percolate through the county.

The battle was protracted and bloody, with some estimates putting the number of casualties at about 50,000, with equal numbers of dead and wounded on each side. Yet for civilians in Britain it decisively concluded over 20 years of warfare, and Wellington was widely honored for his victory, despite the fact that British forces were a minority of the Allied armies, and it was only the timely arrival of German troops that tipped the balance – even Wellington admitted that it was ‘the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life’.

Many monuments commemorate the battle, such as the cross above, although this was not erected until 1866, years after Wellington’s death. But not everyone welcomed the defeat of Napoleon. For many radicals and romantics, such as Byron, the French emperor was the heir to the revolutionary spirit of 1792, and British troops had died to replace a hated Bourbon on the throne of France. These sympathisers included the sixth Duke of Devonshire, who displayed a large marble bust of the emperor at Chatsworth, and as part of a liberal, Whig family had no time for the arch-Tory Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington.