Quite a while ago, I wrote a post about Napolean's horse, Marengo. As you probably remember Marengo is said to have been the favorite horse of the French emperor. Interestingly enough, it is very possible that he and one of his cousins, Copenhagen, or so it is said, faced each other in a terrible battle. On Sunday the 18th of June, 1815, near Waterloo in present-day Belgium then part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, Napoleon's French army lead by Napoleon, was defeated by a coalition of two armies, one led by the Duke of Wellington riding Compenhagen.
Where there is some doubt about Marengo's authenticity, Copenhagen was very real. He was a stallion with a rather mean temperament. When the Duke of Wellington returned from his victory at Waterloo, he gave Copenhagen a celebratory pat on the rump. Copenhagen responded by trying to kick the Duke in the head! Luckily for both of them, he missed. It would have been a really bad day for the Duke to survive a day of bullets and cannon fire only to be killed by a kick in the head from the very horse that carried him through the battle!
The story is that Copenhagen became much milder in his old age and became a favorite with the ladies who wanted tail hair to make bracelets. (By the Way: this is something that is going on today and some people in Colorado have actually come out to their barns to find that someone has snuck in during the night and cut off their horse's tail! So, don't buy those horse hair bracelets unless you know where the hair came from!)
Copenhagen was so well regarded that, after he died, his head was cast in bronze and put on display at Wellington College.
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