The horse known as Marengo found fame as the favourite charger of Napoleon Bonaparte, later Napoleon I. A diminutive grey Arabian, who stood just 14.1 hands high, he was reputedly captured during the Egyptian Campaign during the French Revolutionary Wars and named after the Battle of Marengo, which was fought on June 14, 1800 in Piedmont, Italy, during the War of the Second Coalition. However, the register of the Imperial Stables contains no reference to ‘Marengo’, so it is conceivable that another horse was so-called, by way of a nickname.
Either way, following the Second Italian Campaign, Marengo carried the by-then Emperor for the whole of the Napoleonic Wars, from the Battle of Ulm in October 1805 to the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815. Following that decisive conflict, in which Napoleon was defeated by a coalition led by the Duke of Wellington and Marshal Blücher, Marengo was captured by William, Eleventh Baron Petre and transported him to England. The horse was subsequently sold on to Lieutenant-Colonel William Angerstein, who stood him at stud at New Barnes, near Ely, Cambridgeshire.
Marengo died, of old age, at the age of 38 in 1831. His skeleton was preserved and put on display at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), established by the Duke of Wellington and other senior military commanders in Whitehall, London that same year. In 1963, it was moved to the National Army Museum, founded at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 1960 and nowadays in Chelsea, London, where after substantial cleaning and conservation it remains to this day. Nevertheless, in 2017, councillors representing North Cork, where it is widely believed that Marengo was bred, wrote to the National Army Museum, requesting the repatriation of the skeleton. The museum declined the request on the grounds that it would not not ‘decolonise’ the museum of artefacts.