This sculpture of General Charles James Napier is located in Trafalgar Square. The sculptor is George Gamon Adams.
The inscriptions on the plinth read:
"Charles James Napier
General
Born
MDCCLXXXII
Died
MDCCCLIII"
and
"Erected by public subscription
the most numerous contributors
being private soldiers"
Wikipedia (
visit link) informs us:
"General Sir Charles James Napier, GCB (10 August 1782 – 29 August 1853), was a general of the British Empire and the British Army's Commander-in-Chief in India, notable for conquering the Sindh Province in what is now Pakistan...
The Peninsular War
Napier commanded the 50th (Queen's Own) Regiment of Foot during Peninsular War in Iberia against Napoleon Bonaparte. Napier's activities there ended during the Battle of Corunna, in which he was wounded and left for dead on the battlefield. Napier was rescued, barely alive, by a French Army drummer named Guibert, and taken as a prisoner-of-war. Nevertheless, Napier was awarded an Army Gold Medal after he was returned to British hands.
Napier recuperated from his wounds while he was being held near the headquarters of the French Marshall Soult, and then somehow he was returned to the British Army.
Napier volunteered to return to the Iberian Peninsula in 1810 to fight again against Napoleon in Portugal - notably in the Battle of the Côa, where he had two horses shot out from under him, in the Battle of Bussaco, in the Battle of Fuentes de Onoro, and in the Battle of Badajoz (1812) (the second siege of Badajoz) in Extremadura, Spain, in which he was a lieutenant colonel in the 102nd regiment. For his deeds at Bussaco and at Fuentes de Oñoro, Napier won the silver medal with two clasps.
In 1838, Napier returned to England to become the General Officer Commanding of the British Northern District.
Service in India
In 1842, at the age of 60, Napier was appointed Major General to the command of the Indian army within the Bombay Presidency. Here Lord Ellenborough's policy led Napier to Sindh Province (Scinde), for the purpose of quelling the insurrection of the Muslim rulers who had remained hostile to the British Empire following the First Anglo-Afghan War. Napier's campaign against these chieftains resulted in victories in the Battle of Miani (Meanee) against General Hoshu Sheedi and the Battle of Hyderabad, and then the subjugation of the Sindh Province, and its annexation by its eastern neighbours.
His orders had been only to put down the rebels, and by conquering the whole Sindh Province he greatly exceeded his mandate. Napier was supposed to have despatched to his superiors the short, notable message, "Peccavi", the Latin for "I have sinned" (which was a pun on I have Sindh). This pun appeared in a cartoon in Punch magazine in 1844 beneath a caricature of Charles Napier. The true author of the pun was, however, Catherine Winkworth, an English girl then in her teens, who submitted it to Punch, which then printed it as a factual report. Later proponents of British rule over the East Indians justified the conquest thus: "If this was a piece of rascality, it was a noble piece of rascality!"
On 4 July 1843, Napier was appointed Knight Grand Cross in the military division of the Order of the Bath, in recognition of his leading the victories at Miani and Hyderabad."