His valour at Waterloo was matched in the preceding years, because he played a pivotal part in the road to Waterloo, through Spain, in the Peninsular war. And he was, I think, a very significant element in forcing the French out of Spain, where of course Napoleon had installed his brother as the king. And the battles in which Picton played such an important part are commemorated on the obelisk in Carmarthen: the battles of Bussaco, Fuentes de Oñoro, Badajoz—which was a very terrible engagement; he was severely wounded there as well. But he wouldn't leave the ramparts, and the day after, having recently inherited a fortune having won the battle, he gave every survivor under his command a guinea, which was a considerable sum in those days. He then was invalided home, but he returned later in the year to fight the battles of Victoria, and to fight through the Pyrenees. This was a very important part of forcing Napoleon back to, ultimately, Waterloo and his own personal destruction. Picton was awarded the KCB and he became the Member of Parliament for Pembroke Boroughs.

After he was killed at Waterloo, his body was brought home in state, accompanied by a regiment of soldiers, who took over a week to get from Deal, where they landed, to London, where he was buried first of all in St George's, Hanover Square, but a public monument was erected by order of Parliament in St Paul's Cathedral. When Wellington died, in 1852, a decision was taken to exhume Picton from St George's, Hanover Square, and he was then reburied in St Paul's Cathedral, which is where he lies today.

Of course, his life did have certain controversies in it, which were well known at the time, when he was Governor of Trinidad. But his defence to the charges that were laid against him was that he was acting under the orders of his superior officer, Abercromby, who said that he had to administer the law according to the laws of Spain, from whom Britain had recently taken Trinidad.

But history is a chequerboard, and we have to accept the good with the bad—the black squares as well as the white squares. Guy Gibson won the Victoria Cross for the dambusters raid, but, as everybody knows, he had a dog called Nigger, and would that bar him, similarly, from being commemorated today? Well, I think not. Nobody approves of using words like that any more, but we have to recognise that these men were men of their time, in their different ways, and that has, I think, to be accommodated.

It's very important, I think, that we should memorialise Welsh and British heroes, because the history of a nation defines that nation, and ripping up every reference that we find inconvenient today to our great history and heritage is not, I think, something to be proud of. History should always be judged in its own context, and the motives of those who judge history in today's context I think should be treated with suspicion, because more often than not, as in this case, the motivation will be for some kind of political objective and not revising an historical narrative.

These are great people who are being commemorated for the great things that they did during their time, and removing problematic statues will not, of course, wash away the painful periods of our past. It seems that no statue is safe. Picton I've spoken about, and the paradox of Picton is that the man he was fighting, Napoleon, had actually reintroduced slavery into the West Indies, in 1802, it having first of all been abolished by the Revolutionary Government in 1794. And so, the ultimate victory of Waterloo, in which Picton himself played a significant part, was responsible for the abolition of slavery in the West Indies. And so, is that not another reason why we should commemorate Sir Thomas Picton?

The contrast with France is very significant, of course. Whilst we have people in this country who want to get rid of monuments to Picton, Napoleon still lies in state in the Hôtel des Invalides, and is regarded as one of the great Frenchmen, even though he tried to enslave the whole of Europe.