There was a scraping of chairs and they were all on their feet in token of respect for the slight man in the grey undress frock who entered.

It was Lord Wellington.
Saluting the members of the court with two fingers to his cocked hat, he immediately desired them to sit, peremptorily waving his hand, and requesting the president not to allow his entrance to interrupt or interfere with the course of the inquiry.
"A chair here for me, if you please, sergeant," he called and, when it was fetched, took his seat at the end of the table, with his back to the door through which he had come and immediately facing the prosecutor.
He retained his hat, but placed his riding-crop on the table before him; and the only thing he would accept was an officer's notes of the proceedings as far as they had gone, which that officer himself was prompt to offer.

With a repeated injunction to the court to proceed, Lord Wellington became instantly absorbed in the study of these notes.
Colonel Grant, standing very straight and stiff in the originally red coat which exposure to many weathers had faded to an autumnal brown, continued and concluded his statement of what he had seen and heard on the night of the 28th of May in the garden at Monsanto.
The judge-advocate now invited him to turn his memory back to the luncheon-party at Sir Terence's on the 27th, and to tell the court of the altercation that had passed on that occasion between Captain Tremayne and Count Samoval.
"The conversation at table," he replied, "turned, as was perhaps quite natural, upon the recently published general order prohibiting duelling and making it a capital offence for officers in his Majesty's service in the Peninsula.

Count Samoval stigmatised the order as a degrading and arbitrary one, and spoke in defence of single combat as the only honourable method of settling differences between gentlemen.

Captain Tremayne dissented rather sharply, and appeared to resent the term 'degrading' applied by the Count to the enactment.