Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Picton (24 August 175818 June 1815) was a British Army officer and colonial administrator. He fought in the Napoleonic Wars and died at Waterloo. According to the historian Alessandro Barbero, Picton was "respected for his courage and feared for his irascible temperament". The Duke of Wellington called him "a rough foul-mouthed devil as ever lived", but found him capable.
While his military prowess is not in doubt, as a colonial administrator he was considered to be a harsh disciplinarian, even by some at the time. He approved the use of torture during his governorship of Trinidad. He was put on trial in England for approving the picketing of a 14-year-old girl. Though convicted, Picton later had a retrial arguing that Trinidad was subject to Spanish law, in which no judgement was ever reached by the jury.
Controversy over his use of torture has revived in recent years and Picton's role in the Atlantic slave trade has also come under scrutiny (he was a slave owner who was involved in slave catching). In 2020, Cardiff Council voted to remove Picton's statue in the "Heroes of Wales" gallery in Cardiff City Hall. In the same year it was reported that a plaque was removed from Picton's birthplace. In 2022, the National Museum Cardiff relocated Picton's portrait from its "Faces of Wales" gallery to a side room, accompanied by descriptions of his brutal treatment of the people of Trinidad. The town of Picton in New Zealand, named for Picton, has considered reverting to its Māori name in response to his actions as governor of Trinidad.
Picton is also remembered for his exploits under Wellington in the Iberian Peninsular War of 1807–1814, during which he displayed great bravery and persistence. He was killed in 1815 fighting at the Battle of Waterloo whilst commanding the 5th Infantry Division. During a crucial stage in the battle he was ordered by Wellington to intervene in the Allied centre, which was beginning to buckle under the weight of a heavy French assault. Picton led the 5th division in aggressive counter-advance which stopped d'Erlon's corps' attack against the allied centre left. The manoeuvre however cost Picton his life when he was struck through the head by French shot. His body was carried from the field by soldiers of the 32nd Foot who Picton had personally led in a bayonet charge against the French line. He was the most senior officer to die at Waterloo. At the time of his death he was a sitting Member of Parliament.
Early life
Thomas Picton was the seventh of 12 children of Thomas Picton (1723–1790) of Poyston Hall, Pembrokeshire, Wales, and his wife, Cecil née Powell (1728–1806).Havard 2004. He was born in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire on (probably) 24 August 1758. In 1771 he obtained an ensign's commission in the 12th Regiment of Foot, but he did not join until two years later. The regiment was then stationed at Gibraltar, where he remained until he was made captain in the 75th Regiment of Foot (Prince of Wales's Regiment) in January 1778, at which point he then returned to Britain.
The regiment was disbanded five years later, and Picton quelled a mutiny amongst the men by his prompt personal action and courage, and was promised the rank of major as a reward. He did not receive it, and after living in retirement on his father's estate for nearly 12 years, he went out to the West Indies in 1794 on the strength of a slight acquaintance with Sir John Vaughan, the commander-in-chief, who made him his aide-de-camp and gave him a captaincy in the 17th Regiment of Foot. Shortly afterwards he was promoted major in the 58th Regiment of Foot.He was probably still acting in a "staff" role rather than (simply) as a regimental officer: Fortescue, History of the British Army, notes him "making his first appearance in these pages" directing reinforcements to various islands without need for reference to Vaughan.
Career in the New World Under Sir Ralph Abercromby, who succeeded Vaughan in 1795, Picton was present at the capture of Saint Lucia (after which he was promoted to lieutenant colonel of the 56th Regiment of Foot) and then that of St Vincent.
After the reduction of Trinidad in 1797, Abercromby made Picton governor of the island. For the next five years he held the island with a garrison he considered inadequate against the threats of internal unrest and of reconquest by the Spanish. He ensured order by vigorous action, viewed variously as rough-and-ready justice or as arbitrary brutality. Picton was also accused of the execution of a dozen slaves, and the slave trade was partly behind his considerable fortune. Historian Chris Evans said, "Delinquents who were sent for immediate execution might consider themselves lucky; others had to endure mutilation and torture."
In October 1801 he was gazetted to the local rank of brigadier-general. During the negotiations leading to the Peace of Amiens of 1802, many of the British inhabitants petitioned against the return of the island to Spain; this together with Picton's and Abercromby's representations, ensured the retention of Trinidad as a British possession.
By then, reports of arbitrariness and brutality associated with his governorship had led to a demand at home for his removal. Picton was also making money from speculation in land and slaves, and his free coloured mistress and mother of four of his children, Rosetta Smith, was believed to be corruptly influencing his decisions. Furthermore, Trinidad no longer faced any external threat, the Pitt ministry had fallen and the new Addington administration did not want Trinidad to develop the plantation economy Picton favoured. In 1802, William Fullarton (1754–1808) was appointed as the Senior Member of a commission to govern the island, Samuel Hood became the second member, and Picton himself the junior.
Fullarton had a very different background from Picton. He came from a wealthy and long-established Scots land-owning family and was a Whig MP, a Fellow of the Royal Society, an improving landlord, and a patron of Robert Burns. He had been a junior diplomat before raising a regiment in the course of the American War of Independence, of which he naturally became the Colonel. He ended that war in India, commanding an army of 14,000 men in operations against Tippu Sultan.The general being sacked for incompetence, Fullarton, (a civilian 3 years ago, and fresh to India) was (because he had raised a regiment at his own expense) senior in the Army List to other colonels present, and hence took command (and acquitted himself well) Afterwards he had written an influential pamphlet arguing that the East India Company had brought trouble on itself by its unprincipled treatment of native princes and native subjects, and that a more humane policy would be preferable to "let them hate so long as they fear" (a favourite motto of Caligula).
Picton's policy with respect to various sections of the island population had effectively been one of rule by fear, and he and Fullarton rapidly fell out. (This, of itself, further worsened the rift: Fullarton's Indian pamphlet had also reported adversely on conflicts of interest and dissension between the English having weakened their ability to govern well, to negotiate effectively, and to effectively defend their possessions.) Fullarton commenced a series of open enquiries on allegations against Picton and reported his unfavourable views on Picton's past actions at length to meetings of the commission. Picton thereupon tendered his resignation on 31 May 1803.
Arrest and trials Picton joined Hood in military operations in Saint Lucia and Tobago, before returning to Britain to face charges brought by Fullarton. In December 1803 he was arrested by order of the Privy Council and promptly released on bail set at £40,000.
The Privy Council dealt with the majority of the charges against Picton. Those charges related principally to accusations of excessive cruelty in the detection and punishment of practitioners of Obeah, severity to slaves, and of execution of suspects out of hand without due process. Only the latter class of charge seems to have seriously worried the Privy Council, and here Picton's argument that either the laws of Trinidad (then still the laws of the former Spanish colonial power: Abercromby had specifically instructed Picton to conduct himself according to those laws) or "the state of the garrison" (martial law) justified the immediate execution in the cases specified eventually carried the day.This was not a foregone conclusion, nor unimportant to Picton: one of the cases was the execution without trial or court-martial of a British soldier for desertion and rape; in the same period, the former military commander of Gorée was publicly hanged for having a soldier flogged to death without a court-martial.
Picton was, however, tried in the Court of King's Bench before Lord Ellenborough in 1806 on a single charge: the misdemeanour of having in 1801 caused torture to be unlawfully inflicted to extract a confession from Luisa Calderón, a 14-year-old free mulatto girl suspected of assisting one of her lovers to burgle the house of the man with whom she was living, making off with about £500. Torture (but not the specific form) had been requested in writing by a local magistrate and approved in writing by Picton. The torture applied ("picketing") was a version of a British military punishment and consisted in principle of compelling the trussed-up suspect to stand on one toe on a flat-headed peg for one hour on many occasions within a span of a few days. Calderón was subjected to one session of 55 minutes, and a second of 25 minutes the following day. The young girl was suspended by one arm on a pulley rope set in the ceiling and lowered onto a peg in the floor, bare foot first. This continued until her entire body weight rested on the peg. She did not confess and was imprisoned for a further eight months before being released.
The period between Picton's return and the trial had seen a pamphlet war between the rival camps, and the widespread sale of engravings showing a curious British public what an attractive 14-year-old mulatto girl being trussed up and tortured in a state of semi-undress might look like. At the trial, Luisa Calderón gave evidence in person ("Her appearance was extremely interesting, and her countenance, which was that of a mulatto, extremely prepossessing and agreeable") of the nature and duration of her picketing. The legal arguments, however, revolved on whether Spanish law permitted torture of suspects. On the evidence presented by the prosecution and with Picton's defence being damaged by the cross-examination of his witnesses ("Mr Bourville was examined relative to the nature of the office of alkald, or justice at Trinidad. On his cross examination by William Garrow, he said, the first introduction of torture was by General Picton." ... "Mr Gloucester, the Attorney-General at Trinidad, verified several books as books of authority, in which it was expressly laid down, that by the Spanish law torture might be inflicted; these books were, the Borvillia, the Curia Phillipion, and the Elesando. On his cross-examination he admitted that the Caedula and Raecopilazione were also books of authority. They contained a code expressly applicable to the Spanish West India Islands, and there was not a word about torture in them"); the jury decided that it did not and found Picton guilty.