The night Britain burned down the White House and stole the President's clothes: The forgotten invasion which shows the special relationship could be a LOT worse



Just imagine foreign troops invading London, defeating the British Army in Hyde Park then marching on Buckingham Palace.

The Queen and Prince Philip order their most precious belongings piled into a lorry and are whisked off to safety before the enemy break in and burn the place down.

Unthinkable? Well, that’s just what the British did to the White House in Washington nearly 200 years ago.

Attack! The War of 1812 led to one of the most remarkable scenes of Anglo-American foreign relations in history

What’s more, in the expectation that their army would beat the British, the American President and his wife had ordered a slap-up meal prepared for 40 guests. They’d been counting on celebrating a victory. Instead they found themselves fleeing for their lives.

When the British invaders in their blood-stained uniforms burst into the White House, they found the table elegantly laid for dinner, meat roasting on spits and the President’s best wine on the sideboard.

Delightedly, they tucked in. One young officer said of the President’s Madeira wine: ‘Never was nectar more grateful to the palates of the gods . . .’ Afterwards he nipped up to the President’s bedroom and swapped his sweaty tunic for a smartly-ironed presidential shirt.

One of his comrades bundled up the silver White House cutlery in the tablecloth. The British commander then calmly told his men to pile the chairs on to the tables and torch the building.

Before the night was done they also burned both houses of Congress, the War Office, the State Department and the Treasury. It is the only time in U.S. history that outsiders have raided the capital.

Tread carefully: President Obama may welcome David Cameron to the White House today...

...but wind the clock back to 1814 and a very different 'special relationship' emerges

To say the least, the burning of the White House marked a low point in Anglo-American relations — and seems all the more relevant in the light of pressure on the ‘special relationship’ following the recent vote by British MPs against military action in Syria.

As a result of this, senior British military officials have been barred from planning meetings and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry praised France, still supportive of military action, as America’s ‘oldest ally’. It’s almost like old times.

The attack on Washington was one of the most audacious military enterprises ever and the single most destructive act in the almost forgotten ‘War of 1812’, which actually lasted nearly three years.

America had declared war on Britain over control of the seas — partly to do with trade restrictions resulting from our war with France — but also because it had ambitions to control Canada.

Victory? The night before the White House was burned, President James Madison had laid in a celebratory meal, thinking they had beaten the British

But Britain was occupied with the conflict with Napoleon: only when the French Emperor was exiled to Elba in the spring of 1814 did the British Government feel free to turn on the Americans with real vigour.

Some 4,500 grizzled British veterans, who’d fought under Wellington and defeated the French in Spain, arrived in Chesapeake Bay near Washington DC in the full heat of summer. Most of them had been looking forward to going home, not crossing the Atlantic to fight America.

One dashing young officer, Captain Harry Smith, had to wave goodbye to his 16-year-old Spanish wife when he was dispatched as a staff officer with the task force.

Its popular commander, Major General Robert Ross, had helped Wellington win the Peninsular war. He had a reputation for courage verging on recklessness. His orders were to give the Americans ‘a good drubbing’.

If Ross had any doubts about what that meant, his Royal Navy comrade in arms, Rear Admiral George Cockburn, a fiery and ruthless old sea-dog, had none. He urged Ross to land the army, march the 50 miles to Washington and burn the place to the ground.

Cockburn had already been busy for a year raiding and burning American towns in the Chesapeake area. To the Americans he was an ‘infamous scoundrel and notorious incendiary’. They offered a reward for his capture dead or alive and ‘$500 for each of his ears’.

When the news reached Washington that a large British army had joined up with Cockburn, there was pandemonium. Families piled their furniture on carts and headed out of town.

President James Madison was one of America’s founding fathers, a studious, severe-looking man who usually wore black. One visitor said he looked like a schoolmaster dressed for a funeral.

Best of British: Major General Robert Ross, left, and Rear Admiral George Cockburn, right, orchestrated the burning of the White House



Whatever else he was, Madison was no great war leader. He chose two hopeless misfits to manage the country’s defence. His War Secretary, John Armstrong, arrogantly refused to take any serious measures to meet the British invasion.



His military commander, Brigadier General William Winder, a pinched-looking officer with an undistinguished record, frantically tried to persuade the 15 states in the Union to provide him with troops.

Unfortunately, most of America’s small regular army was attempting to invade British Canada. So he would mainly have part-timers, many of them poorly trained.

Summons: Brigadier General William Winder had the unenviable task of trying to raise troops from the 15 states

But there was no lack of enthusiasm in the ranks.

John Pendleton Kennedy was a militiaman from Baltimore thrilled with his ‘dashy uniform’ and relishing the prospect of killing the hated British. He’d lost his boots but was wearing the dancing pumps he’d brought along in the hope that the Madisons would throw a victory ball at the White House.

The two armies met at Bladensburg, five miles north-east of Washington. The British, sweltering in their woolly red tunics, had left many of their comrades expiring in the August heat on the march from the ships.

But they were confident that they’d defeat these ‘Yankees’ just as they’d scattered Napoleon’s troops on the hot plains of Europe.

The Americans were full of spirit but clumsily spaced out in three lines of troops that were too far apart to support each other. Madison, deeply concerned, was the only U.S. President, other than Abraham Lincoln half a century later, to be present on a battlefield.

He asked Armstrong and Winder for their advice but they’d none to offer him. He sent a message to his wife, Dolley, telling her to prepare to leave the White House.

Bravely, she replied that she had no intention of doing so until she knew he was safe.

The battle actually started well for the Americans: Robert Ross, the British commander, rashly sent his advance guard straight into heavy American artillery fire at very close range. The front ranks were mown down. One young subaltern had a reckless streak in him, calling out to his men to follow him, shouting: ‘Now, who will be the first in the enemy’s lines?’

A friend tried hard to restrain him from rushing ahead, but ‘at the very moment when I was repeating my entreaties’, the friend wrote in his diary, ‘a musket ball struck him on the neck and he fell dead at my feet. The bullet passed through his windpipe and spinal marrow, and he was a corpse in an instant’.

Nation's pride? War Secretary John Armstrong, who stubbornly refused to meet the British invasion

One captain, John Knox, wrote home that he’d never received such blistering fire. He passed the mangled bodies of three officers and eight or nine men of his regiment sprawling on the ground dead or wounded: ‘Thinks I to myself, by the time the action is over the devil is in it if I am not either a walking major or a dead captain.’

But the iron discipline of the Peninsula veterans told in the end: the first American line collapsed and then the second. ‘We made a fine scamper of it,’ said John Pendleton Kennedy of the helter-skelter retreat, sadly aware that his shoes would do no dancing that night.

British rockets, little more than poorly-aimed fireworks but terrifying if they exploded nearby, did much to scare the Americans. And the irrepressible naval commander George Cockburn, who had persuaded Ross to let him accompany the army on to the battlefield, rode flamboyantly up and down directing the rocketeers.

He pooh-poohed his aide’s suggestion that he take cover, although one musket shot passed between the admiral’s leg and the flap of his saddle.

By teatime the U.S. army had either run away or been withdrawn, and only a valiant stand by the third line did something to redeem American honour. It was one of the more shameful defeats in U.S. history and the road to the capital was now wide open.

With George Cockburn urging him on, Ross ordered the burning of both houses of Congress in the ornate U.S. Capitol building. Next stop was the White House.

Cockburn, Ross and their staff explored the magnificent mansion, just 14 years old and lovingly furnished by Dolley Madison. Before she fled, she had insisted on taking the time to remove her favourite red curtains and a picture of George Washington, America’s first President, from the dining room wall, which she made sure was carted off to safety.

Star spangled: Francis Scott Key saw the silver lining in the clouds of smoke above Washington - enough to pen what would become the American national anthem

The British didn’t take long to wolf down the meal and set fire to the place. Fifty soldiers were stationed outside, and when the order was given, they smashed the windows and hurled in torches.

In minutes, the blaze swept through the main reception rooms, devouring all the treasures Dolley Madison hadn’t had time to rescue. Captain Harry Smith wrote that he’d never forget the ‘majesty of the flames’. But he believed that burning the shrines of American democracy went beyond the bounds of civilised behaviour.

A Westminster MP, Sam Whitbread, later told the Commons Britain had done ‘what even the Goths refused to do at Rome’.

But Cockburn and Ross were unrepentant, and now set their sights on Baltimore, one of America’s richest cities, 30 miles to the north-east.

On September 12, Ross and Cockburn landed the army at North Point, 15 miles from Baltimore. Ross boldly announced that he would eat dinner in the city that night and insisted on leading his army from the front.

Suddenly a shot rang out and he slumped in his saddle. A well-aimed American musket ball had hit him in the chest and fatally wounded him.

It was a heavy blow to the army’s morale. But they pressed on, beating back the U.S. force in their path.

The British had advanced to within reach of the strongly-manned entrenchments at the edge of Baltimore. From the sea, Royal Navy frigates and gunboats armed with mortars subjected Fort McHenry to a massive bombardment that lasted 25 hours.

A young American lawyer and poet, Francis Scott Key, watched the rockets, shells and roundshot screaming overhead through the night and doubted the fort could survive. He peered through the dawn mist as the firing died away. Surely the British flag must now be flying on its ramparts?

But no, he was thrilled to make out the giant American stars and stripes still proudly aloft. The British had abandoned their attack.

Scott Key could hardly contain himself. He found a piece of paper in his pocket and jotted down verses that would make him famous for ever. ‘Oh say can you see by the dawn’s early light . . . Oh say does that star spangled banner yet wave o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?’

The Americans saw the Battle for Baltimore as a historic victory and Scott Key’s poem later became their national anthem.

The war with America went on for only four more months with no real gains for either side. Both soon saw the endless tit-for-tat bloodshed and destruction as futile, and the peace that followed laid the basis for the relationship between Britain and America that has lasted ever since.

Wary: Britain and America may be close allies today, but rivalries still run deep

The two English-speaking powers that had been bitter enemies became the closest of friends, and never fought each other again.

James and Dolley Madison never returned to the White House. It took three years of rebuilding before the next president, James Monroe, could move in and another 12 to add the fine porticos on the north and south of the building that we see today.

Only a few small burn marks have been deliberately left on the whitewash to remind the world of the bitter memories of 200 years ago.

Whatever disagreements Britain and America may have over the Syrian conflict, our leaders would do well to recall those dark days, and resolve that our two nations never plunge into such an abyss again.