While inspecting troops in Colchester for duty against Napoleon, the Duke of York came upon one man who gave new meaning to the word Veteran.
In September 1811, during the Napoleonic Wars, George the Prince Regent and his brother Frederick, Duke of York and Albany, were reviewing the troops of the Eastern Command on Lexden Heath, near Colchester, when they spied an elderly man wearing a uniform from a bygone age and perched on an aged pony. They asked the division’s commander General John Pitt, Earl of Chatham, what he was doing there.