Overall: 42cm (16.5in) x 38cm (15in)
Oil on tin. English School three quarter length portrait looking slight left, the subject in uniform comprising red coat with blue facings and silver lace, his tricorn tucked under his left arm. Period label verso inscribed ‘Waller’. Containted in period gilt wood frame. Oval: 25cm x 20cm.
Major Henry Waller (1742-92) 1st Dragoon Guards was promoted from brevet rank on 14 May 1785 (Caledonian Mercury 21.5.1785). 1st (The King’s) Dragoon Guards were then serving a 30 year stint on home service, having distinguished themselves in the Seven Years War (1756-63) at Minden (1759) and Corbach (1760), and in its desperate charge helped saved the retreating Allied army. Later, it had also fought at Warburg (1760) and Vellinghausen (1761).
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In 1781, Waller, while a Captain in the 1st (or King's) Regiment of Dragoon Guards, was appointed to the command of 8 independent companies drawn from 65 on the British Establishment at the time, with rank of Major-Commandant. Despite some research in the 1920s, the purpose of Waller's Corps of Foot is unknown but judging by the names of other similar corps it was possibly intended for service in a distant outpost - viz Guernsey Hussars, Tobago Rangers, Falkland Islands Company et al. Waller’s Corps was short-lived and with three others was disbanded in April 1783 and all officers placed on Half Pay (Army List of 1783, p. 186, Army List 1784, pp. 306-7. See Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 1925, Vol. 4, No.18).
Waller was also an amateur poet and music critic who published several works, including ‘familiar poetical epistle’ to Thomas Lamb who controlled the rotten borough of Rye in Sussex and which was occasioned by a wager concerning the statesman John, 4th Earl of Sandwich. In September 1784, Waller returned to familiar territory with a a poem in the Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. LIV, p.688 extolling the virtues of popular Lord Granby, the hero of Warburg, whose contemporaneous ‘popularity was such that his head was the distinguishing sign of half the taverns in the kingdom’.
Waller retired from the Army in 1793 and died the following year. A memorial inside the church at Graveley, Cambridgeshire
reads:
IN MEMORY OF
HENRY WALLER ESQR
late Major in the Kings
Regiment of Dragoons
at whose particular
request his remains
were deposited near this
place June 14th 1794
in the 52nd Year of
his AGE.