With Uxbridge riding at their head, Lord Edward Somerset’s Household Brigade – the Life Guards, Royal Horse Guards (known as the Blues) and the Dragoon Guards – smashed into the cuirassiers with a ‘shock like two walls’. Somerset said their sabres clanged on the shiny metal breast-plates (the cuirass) of the French cavalry with a sound ‘like braziers at work’. He lost his hat and went bare-headed into the charge, and while looking for it, a cannon ball took off the flap of his coat and killed his horse. Somerset found another mount and a Life Guard’s helmet that he wore throughout the rest of the battle.
Sergeant Charles Ewart of the Scots Greys plunged down the slope after Uxbridge and Somerset, and rode into history. Ewart, at 46, was a veteran and one of the most respected men in his regiment, the Royal North British Regiment of Dragoons – known as the Scots Greys because of their insistence on riding grey horses – when it was ordered to Waterloo. Born in Kilmarnock in 1769, on Bedoes farm in Kilmarnock into a family of seven, he was tall and powerfully built, with black hair and a receding hairline. He had become famous in his regiment for training his favourite horse, Jock, to perform tricks in front of the men. Ewart had grown up around horses, which probably led to his decision to join a cavalry regiment. He enlisted in the ranks at the age of 20. Sergeant Major Cotton described Ewart as ‘a man of Herculean strength and of more than ordinary stature being six foot four inches and of considerable skill as a swordsman’.
Ewart’s party trick was to get Jock to stand on his hind legs while Ewart pushed up its forequarters, making it look as though muscle-bound Ewart was lifting up the horse. This performance on the parade ground won him many admirers, but not his major. Ewart taught Jock to grab hats with his teeth, and could not stop Jock one day making a grab for his major’s bearskin. Ewart was also the regimental fencing master and after the Earl of Uxbridge ordered the double charge of the two heavy brigades he put his brilliant skill with a sword to lethal use. The Scots Greys looked magnificently menacing in scarlet tunics with blue facings and gold lace, topped with bearskins and a white plume, but it was the powerful grey horses that Napoleon remembered.
Not far from Sergeant Ewart was another farmer’s son from Scotland, John Dickson of the Scots Greys. Dickson, a corporal in Captain Vernor’s F troop, was mounted on Rattler and closely followed Ewart. He was from East Lothian – his family were tenants of the landowner, Lord Wemyss, an ancient Scottish family with ancestral lands in Fife. Dickson was described as a ‘typical yeoman’, of ruddy complexion, brown hair and hazel eyes. He had enlisted in Glasgow when he was barely 18 in 1807, after a wave of patriotism swept Britain in response to Napoleon’s growing threat to Britain after the Tilsit peace treaty with Russia and Prussia. Dickson noticed that Major General Sir William Ponsonby, the second son of the Irish peer, Lord Ponsonby of County Cork, was on a bay hack because his groom with his thoroughbred charger could not be found when they saddled up. It was to cost Ponsonby his life. Wearing a long cloak and cocked hat, Ponsonby spurred his bay to the thick hedge at the top of the bank before the sunken road. He was followed by his ADC, Major George de Lacy Evans, a veteran of storming parties in the Peninsular War, who had returned a few weeks earlier from America where, with a small body of infantry, he had captured the Congress House in the punitive raid on Washington when the White House was burned down.
Ponsonby looked down at the fighting below then Dickson saw de Lacy Evans wave his hat as a signal to the brigade to advance. Below them, the Highlanders – the 42nd Black Watch and 92nd Gordon Highlanders – fired at the advancing columns barely 20yds away. Sir Denis Pack, commander of the 9th infantry Brigade of Picton’s 5th Division shouted to the Gordon Highlanders: ‘92nd you must advance!’ The Highlanders fixed their bayonets and pushed forward through a holly hedge at the top of the ridge. The Scots Greys were supposed to be in reserve but Lieutenant Colonel James Inglis Hamilton, commander of the regiment, ordered them forward to support the Highlanders, shouting: ‘Now then, Scots Greys, charge!’ Hamilton was from a humble background – he was the son of a sergeant major called Anderson from Lanarkshire but had been adopted by his father’s commanding officer, who brought him up as his own son; he joined the Scots Greys as a Cornet at the age of 15 under his adoptive father’s name. Drawing his sword, Dickson said, Hamilton rode straight at the holly hedge near the crest of the ridge and crossed it. A great cheer rose from the ranks of the Greys and they followed Hamilton. Beyond the first hedge, Dickson said the road was sunk between high, sloping banks, and it was very difficult to descend without falling, but there were few accidents:
All of us were greatly excited, and began crying ‘Hurrah the 92nd! Scotland for ever!’ as we crossed the road for we heard the Highland pipers playing among the smoke and firing below … I dug my spur into my brave old Rattler and we were off like the wind. Just then I saw Major Hankin fall wounded. I felt a strange thrill run through me, and I am sure my noble beast felt the same for, after rearing for a moment, she sprang forward, uttering loud neighings and snortings and leapt over the holly-hedge at terrific speed.
Dickson plainly saw his old friend Pipe Major Cameron standing apart on a hillock, coolly playing ‘Johnny Cope, are ye wakin’ yet?’ above all the din of battle. The Highlanders parted for their fellow Scots on horseback and the rousing shout went up: ‘Scotland Forever!’
As we tightened our grip to descend the hillside among the corn, we could make out the feather bonnets of the Highlanders and heard the officers crying out to them to wheel back by sections. A moment more and we were among them.
Some of the Highlanders had no time to get out of the way and were knocked down by the Greys. According to Dickson ‘many of the Highlanders grasped our stirrups and in the fiercest excitement dashed with us into the fight’.
Towering above the French infantry, the men on the grey horses powered their way into Donzelot’s and Marcognet’s infantry, flashing their sabres right and left as the columns marched up the slope to the east of the Charleroi–Brussels road. ‘A young officer of the [French] Fusiliers made a slash at me with his sword, but I parried it and broke his arm; the next second we were in the thick of them. We could not see five yards ahead for the smoke,’ said Dickson. He saw Armour, a friend from the Ayrshire town of Mauchline, and Sergeant Ewart to his right beside a young officer, Cornet Francis Kinchant. ‘I stuck close by Armour; Ewart was now in front.’ Ewart recalled: ‘We charged through two of their columns, each about 5,000.’ The Highlanders and other foot regiments following behind took thousands of prisoners. De Lacy Evans said:
By the sudden appearance and closing of our cavalry upon them (added to their previous suffering from musketry and grape) they became quite paralysed and incapable of resistance, except occasionally, individually, a little.
Another who took part in the charge said d’Erlon’s columns ‘fled as a flock of sheep across the valley’. Many of the French were shouting ‘Quarter’ to surrender. Ewart was about to cut down one French officer when Cornet Kinchant accepted his surrender. Ewart kicked his horse on but heard a shot and looked around to see Kinchant falling from his horse. The French officer who had just surrendered had shot him in the head. Ewart was so enraged that he slashed at the officer, cutting him ‘down to the brisket’ (the lower chest).
In his fury, Ewart spurred his horse forward to kill more of d’Erlon’s men. That is when he saw Napoleon’s golden eagle with the standard of the emperor’s 45th Ligne. It was surrounded by a colour guard, determined to defend the eagle with their lives. Dickson saw it too, and spurred on Rattler, hard on Ewart’s heels. He saw Ewart taking on the colour guard single-handed. Dickson kicked Rattler to give Ewart support: ‘I cried to Armour to “Come on!” and we rode at them. Ewart had finished two of them and was in the act of striking a third man who held the eagle; next moment I saw Ewart cut him down and he fell dead.’ Ewart said:
He and I had a hard contest for it. The bearer thrust at my groin. I parried it off and cut him down through the head, after which I was attacked by one of their Lancers, who threw his lance at me, but missed the mark by my throwing it off with my sword by my right side. Then I cut him from the chin upwards, which cut went through his teeth.
Dickson was just in time to thwart a bayonet thrust that was aimed at Ewart’s neck. Armour finished another of them. Ewart said, ‘Next I was attacked by a foot soldier who, after firing at me, charged me with his bayonet. But he very soon lost the combat for I parried it, and cut him down through the head, so that finished the contest for the eagle.’
Ewart’s bloody prowess with a heavy cavalry sabre is a source of some amazement by fencers today. Owen Davis, one of Ewart’s descendants, said:
This feat of arms was nothing short of spectacular and as a sport sabre fencer myself I can appreciate the agility and quick thinking needed, notwithstanding the strength required to cut up through a man’s skull and to move from guard with such an unwieldy weapon as the 1796 Heavy Cavalry Pattern Sword.1
The pole of the eagle standard had been jammed in the soft ground, while the fight to the death went on around it and Ewart snatched it up before it fell to the ground:
I was about to follow my comrades, eagle and all, but was stopped by the General (Ponsonby) saying, “You brave fellow, take that to the rear; you have done enough till you get quit of it,” which I was obliged to do, but with great reluctance.
On the ridge, Ewart watched with increasing horror as one of the greatest cavalry charges in British military history turned into a disaster:
I retired to a height and stood there for upwards of an hour which gave a general view of the field, but I cannot express the horrors I beheld. The bodies of my brave comrades were lying so thick upon the field that it was scarcely possible to pass, the horses innumerable.
Across the battlefield, it was every man for himself. Corporal John Shaw of the Life Guards, one of Ewart’s garrison friends, wielded his heavy sabre with skills he had learned from Ewart, slashing through a man’s skull so hard that the ‘face fell off like a bit of apple’.*
Shaw was a celebrated former prize fighter who had been taught by Ewart how to use a sword while they were both in London. Shaw was from farming stock at Wollaton, Nottinghamshire, and built like an ox. He was 6ft 3in tall and weighed 15 stone, and was proud of his powerful physique; he had posed naked for the art classes of the Royal Academy in London including a study by William Etty, now in the Household Cavalry Museum, Horse Guards, Whitehall. In the barracks at London, he had shown Ewart how to box while Ewart showed him how to perfect his sword play. Shaw was fighting on the fields to the east of La Haye Sainte and slashed a ‘giant cuirassier’ across the neck. Major Waymouth of the Life Guards saw Shaw, in his red tunic, surrounded by assailants, but hacking them down in a fighting frenzy. He said, ‘Corporal Shaw was very conspicuous, dealing deadly blows all round him …’ Sergeant Thomas Morris, a Londoner of the 73rd Regiment of Foot, which suffered 225 men killed and wounded – the biggest casualties of any line regiment after the Inniskillings – said Shaw had been at the gin before the battle and was fighting drunk. He saw Shaw ‘running a-muck at the enemy, was cut down by them as a madman …’ Like others in the heavy brigades, Shaw rode too far, and when he reined in his horse, he found his way back to the allied lines was cut off. Shaw was last seen:
surrounded by overwhelming numbers of the foe. The contest was a long one and it was only when his sword had been broken in his hand that Shaw’s defence was overcome. Hurling the hilt of his weapon among the enemy, he tore off his helmet and struck out right and left with it; but the swords of the cuirassiers ultimately cut him down.2
He was left for dead on the ground where he fell. Victor Hugo said that as Shaw lay on the ground, ‘a French drummer-boy gave him the coup de grace’ but that was artistic licence. Major Waymouth said Shaw ‘was probably shot down, near that spot, by a cuirassier who stood rather clear of our left and occupied himself by shooting our people with his carbine, taking very deliberate aim.’3 Another eyewitness says Shaw dragged his body up the hill on the French side after the battle to one of the houses lining the Charleroi Road:
After being rendered unconscious by the many wounds he had received, he had crept in pain from the open ground to the protection of the farm buildings at La Belle Alliance. Shaw whispered, ‘I am done for’. He then fell back from sheer exhaustion. In the morning, he was found lying dead, as a result of loss of blood.4
This too may be another of the myths surrounding his heroic death. Private Thomas Playford of the 2nd Life Guards recalled seeing Shaw’s body lying below La Belle Alliance on the field of battle, surrounded by dead French soldiers. Corporal Webster told Playford he recognised Shaw. There was a ‘deep wound in his side, near the heart which appears to have been inflicted with either a bayonet or a lance …’5
Shaw’s name lived on long after his death. A character in Bleak House by Charles Dickens said: ‘Old Shaw, the Life Guardsman! Why he’s a model of the whole British army himself. Ladies and gentlemen, I’d give a fifty pound note to be such a figure of a man.’
Ponsonby’s brigade charged too far up the opposing slope and reached Napoleon’s grand battery, where they madly slashed their sabres at the gunners and their horses. They suddenly realised they had overreached themselves. Dickson and his fellow Scots Greys had continued riding down through the French columns that seemed to open up to let the Greys through. The Scots Greys were riding well to the east of the Charleroi Road and they saw the Royals and Inniskillings clearing the road and hedges at full gallop away to their right. It had all been going so well, until the rout turned to ruin for the men and horses of the heavy brigades: ‘It was a grand sight to see the long line of giant grey horses dashing along with the flowing manes and heads down, tearing up the turf about them as they went,’ said Dickson:
The men in their red coats and tall bearskins were cheering loudly and the trumpeters were sounding the Charge.
In five minutes we had cut our way through as many thousands of Frenchmen. My brave Rattler was becoming quite exhausted, but we dashed onwards.
At this moment, Colonel Hamilton rode up to us crying ‘Charge! Charge the guns!’ and went off like the wind up the hill towards the terrible battery that had made such deadly work among the Highlanders …
It was a mad charge to the grave for many. The heavy cavalry careered on, like Shaw and Lieutenant Colonel Hamilton, slashing all before it, driven either by gin or by the intoxication of war. Hamilton was terribly injured in both arms, but a major saw him going at full speed towards the French guns holding the bridle-reins of his horse in his teeth. Hamilton’s body was found on the field, shot through the heart. His sword had gone, but his scabbard and a sash were still intact, and these were taken back to his family.6
Napoleon was moved to say, ‘These terrible grey horses, how they fight!’ He sent in the lancers to cut them to pieces. The Union Brigade’s horses including the Greys, like Rattler, were blown, and when the troopers reined in, they saw their retreat was cut off in the muddy bottom of the valley between Hougoumont and La Belle Alliance by the lancers of Baron Jacquinot’s 1st Cavalry Division, and Edouard Milhaud’s cuirassiers, who had rallied for a counter-charge.
The death of Major General Ponsonby by M. Dubourg after Manskirch, printed 1 January 1817. (Musée Wellington, Waterloo)
Ponsonby was chased into a ploughed-up waterlogged field, where his horse was overtaken and he was speared by a lancer. British accounts say he was surrounded and captured in the mud – after handing a picture and a watch out of his pocket to his ADC to give to his wife – when there was an attempt by three Scots Greys to rescue him. He was brutally speared to death by his captor.
But according to the French Colonel Louis Bro, commander of Napoleon’s 4th Lancers, the truth was less romantic. Ponsonby was trying to seize a third French eagle, when his Lancers crashed into the Greys: ‘I was lost in a fog of gunsmoke. When it cleared, I saw some English officers surrounding Lieutenant Verrand, the eagle-bearer. Gathering some riders I went to his aid. Sergeant Orban killed General Ponsonby with a blow of his lance. My sabre felled three of his captains. Two others fled.’ The French account is probably nearer to the truth: Major De Lacy Evans made no mention of the eagle but admitted he was with Ponsonby in the thick of the action, and had to abandon him to his fate because Ponsonby’s horse was blown:
Everyone saw what must happen. Those whose horses were best or least blown, got away. Some attempted to escape back to our position by going round the left of the French lancers. Sir William Ponsonby was one of that number. All these fell into the hands of the enemy. Others went back straight – among whom myself – receiving a little fire from some French infantry towards the road on our left as we retired.7
De Lacy Evans added that ‘Poor Sir William’ would have got away with his life, but he was on the small bay hack that was blown. He was one of the most senior British officers killed at Waterloo and Ponsonby’s wife, Georgiana, gave birth to his son and heir in February, 1816.
In all, more than 2,000 French soldiers were taken prisoner after the charge of the heavy brigades; it was claimed up to forty pieces of cannon were put out of action; and two eagles were captured. D’Erlon’s attack was turned by the charge of the heavy cavalry just when it threatened to break Wellington’s thin red line. To that extent, it was a success. But the price paid by the two brigades was appalling. Somerset’s 1st Brigade, which was led by Uxbridge, lost a total 525 men killed, wounded or missing; Ponsonby’s 2nd Brigade posted 533 men killed, wounded or missing, a grand total of 1,058 men out of a total strength on paper of 2,651 horsemen (the actual number who took part in the charge of the two heavy cavalry brigades was slightly less, making the casualty rate worse). This amounted to a casualty rate of 40 per cent.8 The Scots Greys had 102 killed and 97 injured with 179 horses killed and 47 mounts injured. Ewart’s troop fared reasonably well – of 53 officers and men commanded by Captain Robert Vernor, ten were injured – a casualty rate of under 20 per cent.
Across the battlefield, Ponsonby’s second cousin, Sir Frederick Cavendish Ponsonby, had also been left for dead. Sir Frederick, commanding two squadrons of the 12th Light Dragoons in Sir John Vandeleur’s 4th Brigade, was ordered to cover the retreat of the Union Brigade as it was trying to extricate itself from its charge to the guns, when he was wounded. His Light Dragoons, in blue tunics with yellow facings and silver lace, had charged through a column of French infantry and then upon the right flank of the lancers when he was cut across the head and both arms, and knocked from his horse.
Sir Frederick, brother of the scandalous Lady Caroline Lamb, who nursed him back to health, later gave his graphic account – one of the most remarkable personal stories of the battle – to Frances, Lady Shelley, who passed it on by letter to his mother, Lady Bessborough:
We were attacked in our turn before we could form, by about 300 Polish Lancers, who had come down to their relief—the French artillery pouring in amongst us a heavy fire of grape-shot, which, however, for one of our men killed three of their own. In the melee I was disabled almost instantly in both my arms, and followed by a few of my men who were presently cut down—for no quarter was asked or given—I was carried on by my horse, till receiving a blow on my head from a sabre, I was thrown senseless on my face to the ground. Recovering, I raised myself a little to look round, being I believe at that time in a condition to get up and run away, when a Lancer, passing by, exclaimed : ‘Tu n’es pas mort, coquin,’ [‘You’re not dead, scoundrel’] and struck his lance through my back. My head dropped, the blood gushed into my mouth; a difficulty of breathing came on, and I thought all was over. Not long afterwards (it was then impossible to measure time, but I must have fallen in less than ten minutes after the charge) a tirailleur came up to plunder me, threatening to take away my life. I told him that he might search me, directing him to a small side pocket, in which he found three dollars, being all I had. He unloosed my stock [high collar], and tore open my waistcoat, then leaving me in a very uneasy posture. He was no sooner gone, than another came up for the same purpose, but assuring him I had been plundered already, he left me. When an officer, bringing on some troops (to which probably the tirailleurs belonged) and halting where I lay, stooped down and addressed me, saying he feared I was badly wounded, I replied that I was, and expressed a wish to be removed into the rear. He said it was against the orders to remove even their own men, but that if they gained the day, as they probably would, for he understood the Duke of Wellington was killed and that six battalions of the English army had surrendered, every attention in his power should be shown me. I complained of thirst, and he held his brandy bottle to my lips, directing one of his men to lay me down on my side, and placed a knapsack under my head. He then passed on into the action, and I shall never know to whose generosity I was indebted, as I conceive, for my life. Of what rank he was I cannot say; he wore a blue great-coat.* By-and-bye another tirailleur came, and knelt down and fired over me, loading and firing many times, and conversing with great gaiety all the while. At last he ran off, saying: ‘Vous serez bien aise d’entendre que nous allons nous retirer. Bon jour, mon ami.’
Lady Caroline, known as Caro, typically saw romanticism mixed with the horrors of the injured like her brother when they brought him back to Brussels. In a letter to her mother-in-law, Lady Melbourne, Caro wrote:
It is rather a love-making moment, the half-wounded Officers reclining with pretty ladies visiting them … It is rather heart-breaking to be here, however, & one goes blubbering about – seeing such fine people without their legs & arms, some in agony, & some getting better ... Lady Conyngham is here—Lady C. Greville—Lady D. Hamilton, Mrs. A. B. Smith, Lady F. Somerset, Lady F. Webster most affected; Lady Mountmorress, who stuck her parasol yesterday into a skull at Waterloo
Frederick later married the daughter of Lord Bathurst, the War Minister, and landed a plum job as governor of Malta. He died suddenly in a pub in Basingstoke in 1837 aged 53.
With such true stories of valour as Cavendish Ponsonby’s – the stuff of legend – the charge of the heavy brigades and the capture of the two eagles in a single action was seen as a famous triumph at home and caught the imagination of the Prince Regent, who promptly made himself Captain General of the Life Guards and Blues for their ‘brilliant’ conduct at Waterloo.
The legend of the cavalry charge was further ornamented for a Victorian audience in a celebrated heroic painting titled Scotland Forever! by Lady Elizabeth Butler, which remains one of the most often reproduced images of Waterloo. It shows the Scots Greys in a headlong charge, their sabres raised, their horses’ nostrils flared, as if they are about to leap out of the canvas at the viewer. She was one of the few women artists who specialised in military subjects and continued painting to the First World War. Elizabeth Thompson was married to Lieutenant General Sir William Francis Butler, who is said to have arranged for the Scots Greys to charge past her as she made sketches from life. Scotland Forever! was painted in 1881, long after Ewart had died, and included a portrait of the hero bare-headed after losing his bearskin. Her painting of the Scots Greys is scoffed at by some military experts today as inaccurate because they are charging, but she caught the madness in the eyes of the horses and the thrill on the faces of the men, just as Corporal Dickson described it.
Today, the glory of capturing the eagles and turning d’Erlon’s attack into a rout still masks the inconvenient truth. Those closer to the action at the time realised the charge of the heavy cavalry ended in a disaster. Captain Rees Howell Gronow, of the 1st Foot Guards claimed:
The Duke of Wellington was perfectly furious that this arm had been engaged without his orders and lost not a moment in sending them to the rear where they remained during the rest of the day ... I recollect that when his grace was in our square, our soldiers were so mortified at seeing the French deliberately walking their horses between our regiment and those regiments to our right and left that they shouted, ‘Where are our cavalry? Why don’t they come and pitch into those French fellows?’
Uxbridge shouldered the blame for the losses, saying he had been wrong to lead the charge himself, because he could no longer hope to control it from that position: ‘After the overthrow of the cuirassiers I had in vain attempted to stop my people by sounding the rally but neither voice nor trumpet availed ... I committed a great mistake in having myself led the attack.’9 In his own defence, he said that when he returned to the ridge, Wellington and his whole corps diplomatique militaire seemed ‘joyous – they thought the battle was over’.
Wellington took the view recklessness was endemic in the British cavalry. Captain Gronow claimed that a few days after his arrival in Paris, the Duke was told by Colonel Felton Hervey, who carried despatches from London, about the Prince Regent’s self-appointment as a cavalry Captain General. Wellington, Colonel of the Royal Regiment of Horse Guards, replied, ‘Ah, his Royal Highness is our Sovereign and can do what he pleases; but this I will say, the cavalry of other European armies have won victories for their generals, but mine have invariably got me into scrapes …’ Gronow encountered a French officer, Marshal Exelmans, who said the fine horses and riders of the British cavalry were spoiled by their officers:
who have nothing to recommend them but their dash and sitting well in their saddles ...The British cavalry officer seems to be impressed with the conviction that he can dash and ride over everything; as if the art of war were precisely the same as that of fox hunting.10
When compounded by confused orders, the readiness of British cavalry to make suicidal charges against overwhelming odds was to cause the catastrophe thirty-nine years later at Balaklava, known to history as the Charge of the Light Brigade. On 25 October 1854, the Light Brigade led by the incendiary Lord Cardigan, who had clashed with his commanding officer Lieutenant General Lord Lucan, charged 25,000 Russian troops powerfully defended by artillery. Of the 673 men who rode into the valley at Balaklava, only 195 returned – an attrition rate of 71 per cent. The man who presided over the allied army in the Crimea that day was the one-armed, doddery Lord Raglan, formerly FitzRoy Somerset, Wellington’s military secretary at Waterloo, who – like Ewart – had watched in horror as the cavalry rode to their deaths.
Capturing the eagle may have saved Ewart’s life. After watching the horror unfold from the ridge, he took the eagle into Brussels ‘amid the acclamations of thousands of spectators who saw it.’
In his dotage, Ewart went for a drink with a reporter from the Observer in Ayrshire, called James Paterson,11 in a pub in Kilmarnock called The Monument Inn. Over a few drinks, Ewart told Paterson his life story, and about his capture of the eagle. The old soldier proved a fund of stories for Paterson, who incorporated a brief biography of the hero who captured an eagle in a book of his own reminiscences.
Sergeant Ewart was 46, the same age as Wellington, and, like the Duke, not expecting to go to war in Europe, when Bonaparte escaped from Elba. After Waterloo, Ewart spent some months with the occupying forces in Paris and had a stroke of luck in Calais while he was waiting for embarkation on a packet ship to England. While cooling his heels on the dockside, he met Sir John Sinclair, a friend of the Duke of York, the Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, who had heard about Ewart’s fame for capturing the eagle. Sir John said he was so moved by Ewart’s ‘modesty and valour’ that he asked Sergeant Ewart what reward he wanted most in life? Ewart was a very practical Scot: he said if he could be made an Ensign in a veteran battalion, he could retire on an officer’s pension.
Sinclair gave Ewart a letter addressed to Major General Sir Henry Torrens (ADC to the Prince Regent) and instructed Ewart to deliver it in person to Torrens at Horse Guards. Sir Henry wrote to Sir John in 1816 confirming that the Prince Regent, under the direction of his brother the Duke of York, ‘has been pleased ... to appoint Serjeant Ewart of the 2nd Dragoons to an ensigncy in the 3rd Veteran Battalion.’
Ewart’s elevation to the officer classes caused a vacancy for a sergeant that was filled by Dickson, who became a sergeant major and served for twenty-seven years in the Scots Greys. Dickson lived to a ripe old age, still regaling locals at a little Fifeshire inn in Crail with his recollections on the anniversary of 18 June. He died on 16 July 1880, aged 90.
Ensign Ewart returned to Britain as a national hero, and on 18 June 1816 he was invited to attend the first Waterloo dinner at the Edinburgh Assembly Rooms. The Edinburgh Advertiser reported:
Nearly 400 noblemen and gentlemen sat down to an elegant dinner in the Assembly Rooms, the Rt Hon William Arbuthnot, Lord Provost of the city, in the chair. After several toasts had been given and duly honoured, Sir Walter (then Mr) Scott proposed a bumper to the health of Ensign Ewart, late of the Scots Greys, whose bravery was so conspicuous where he took a French Eagle and killed with his own hand three of Napoleon’s guard. The toast was drunk with great acclamation, and a general expectation prevailed that Ensign Ewart, who was present, would address the company. After a short pause, the Lord Provost rose and, at the request of Mr Ewart, stated how much he felt honoured by this mark of the company’s approbation but that he would much rather fight the battle all over again and take another Eagle, than make a speech.
He managed a few words and was given thunderous applause. His fame increased when he was portrayed capturing the eagle in an heroic painting The Fight for the Standard by Richard Ansdell (who was born in Liverpool and was even more famous with Victorians for his Stag at Bay). It was reproduced as a print, and the popular image was reprinted many times. It shows Ewart about to slice through the neck of the colour-guard with his sabre. The original painting is on show in pride of place in the ancient Great Hall, Edinburgh Castle, near to the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards museum, which has his eagle.
Around 1821, the veterans’ battalion* was disbanded and Ewart, 52, was finally retired on his Ensign’s pension of 5s 10d a day. He went to live in Salford with his wife ‘Maggie’, Margaret Geddes, who had been with him on some of his campaigns. Ewart supplemented his pension by spending his retirement as a fencing instructor. Fencing and boxing were fashionable pursuits for gentlemen in the Georgian period and Ewart’s fame would have gained him a good living. He overcame his fear of public speaking and continued to tour the country recounting his memories of capturing the eagle into the Victorian era, sometimes with Sir Walter Scott, who became a friend and his unofficial agent. When he was interviewed by Paterson for his Autobiographical Reminiscences, the journalist said Ewart, in his seventies, could have passed for a man of 60.
Ewart died at Davyhulme, a suburb of Manchester, on 23 March 1846 at the age of 77. Ensign Ewart was given a hero’s funeral and was laid to rest at the New Jerusalem Temple in Bolton Street, Salford. Maggie survived him by ten years but was buried in the Geddes family plot at the east end of the churchyard in nearby Flixton. An inscription at the foot of the Geddes family gravestone read: ‘Also Margaret, Relict* of Ensign Ewart, late of the Scots Greys.’ A local history of Davyhulme12 published in 1898 complained about Ewart and Maggie being apart in death:
It is somewhat pitiful that these two worthies who held on to one another through such eventful episodes, should in death be separated. The officers of the Scots Greys, I understand, did, sometime during last year, send an emissary relative to these two graves with the idea of (with other things) re-interring Sergeant Ewart to the grave of his ‘Maggie’ but the contemplated alterations at the east end of Flixton Church caused the project to remain in abeyance.
That is where Ensign Ewart’s story should have ended. But the church and the churchyard where he was buried at Bolton Street became redundant, and his grave was lost beneath the lumber and detritus of a builders’ yard. I went to see what had happened to his burial place.
I am standing at the scruffy entrance to a surface car park by the side of the Salford Central railway station. The minicab driver thought I was crazy when I asked for Bolton Street. It is now no more than a short stub, jutting into the side of the car park, with double yellow lines to stop anyone parking here. A fragment of wall blackened by ancient soot is all that remains of the buildings that were once there. The taxi driver gets interested when I tell him the reason I have come here.
It is hard to imagine now, this unlovely and unloved urban corner of Greater Manchester was the last resting place of one of the great heroes of the Battle of Waterloo. The wall is perhaps the last remaining trace of the non-conformist New Jerusalem Temple, a branch of a religious sect based on the beliefs of a Swedish philosopher called Emanuel Swedenborg, mixed with mysticism and spiritualism. A Victorian photograph shows the Temple with three nattily dressed men posing for the camera by the entrance in dark suits with waistcoats. They appear to be wearing top hats. It is a handsome, oblong, Georgian-style building, with a glass lantern in the roof, and five large windows down each side, surrounded by paving slabs, which appear to be shiny and wet, as though it has been raining. It is enclosed by a short brick wall topped by some railings. This could be a fragment of the brick wall that I can see. When it became redundant it was knocked down and the land cleared for the builder’s yard. I can find no sign that Ensign Ewart was ever buried here. There is no plaque or headstone. Just cinders, and cars.
Nearly the last resting place of a hero, a car park in Salford, until Charles Ewart was reburied in Edinburgh. (Author)
The hero’s grave remained totally lost and forgotten for ninety-two years, and would have stayed so, but for an inquisitive member of Ewart’s regiment called H. Otto, who spent twelve years trying to find his remains in the 1920s and ’30s. In 1936 Otto finally found Ewart’s bones under the rubble of the builder’s yard. Ewart’s remains were exhumed two years later and were carried to Edinburgh, the home of the Scots Greys. He was finally laid to rest with full honours on the Esplanade of Edinburgh Castle in 1938 as Britain prepared for the Second World War. The Scotsman reported:
About half the crowd had assembled when a motor hearse, with blinds drawn, appeared on the Esplanade, and came to a stop beside the spot where the hero’s remains now rest … The clock in Crown Square had just struck seven when the unpolished oak coffin was taken from the hearse and borne reverently to the grave. As it passed through the lines of onlookers – among them some women and children – heads were bared and policemen saluted.
A large stone memorial to Ensign Ewart was placed on the Castle Esplanade overlooking the city to ensure his name is not forgotten again.
Owen Davis, who has traced his family tree back to Ewart, said: ‘He without a doubt has earned his final resting place on the Esplanade of Edinburgh Castle, the accolades history has showered upon him and above all, the title of “hero”.’ A pub on the Esplanade at Edinburgh Castle was also renamed in his honour. The Ensign Ewart briefly hit the headlines in 2013, when staff at the pub refused to serve the Royal Navy crew from HMS Edinburgh because they were wearing military uniform.13 The sailors had been on a goodwill visit to their home city, and had taken part in a march with the bands playing up the Esplanade. It was all due to a misunderstanding about local by-laws banning bars from serving military personnel during the Edinburgh Tattoo but it seemed to some that it was a case of life imitating art. In his poem, Tommy, Rudyard Kipling anticipated just such an event:
I went into a public-’ouse to get a pint o’ beer,
The publican ‘e up an’ sez, ‘We serve no red-coats here.’
The girls be’ind the bar they laughed an’ giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an’ to myself sez I:
O it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Tommy, go away’;
But it’s ‘Thank you, Mister Atkins’, when the band begins to play,
The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
O it’s ‘Thank you, Mister Atkins’, when the band begins to play.
Ensign Ewart would raise a glass to that.
* Shaw so inspired Sir Walter Scott he had a cast made of his skull. A copy is on show at the Horse Guards Museum, Whitehall.
* Ponsonby later met Major de Laussat of the Imperial Guard Dragoons in 1827 and discovered in their conversation that he was the French officer who had helped him.
* It is likely he was in the 5th Veteran Regiment, not the 3rd, as mentioned in the Torrens letter.
* Relict was an ancient term for a widow, though, as they belonged to different churches, they may not have been actually married.
1. Hougoumont Project website, www.projecthougoumont.com.
2. E. Bruce Law, ‘Life Guardsman Shaw – A Hero of Waterloo’, With Napoleon at Waterloo unpublished papers edited by Mackenzie Macbride (London: Francis Griffiths, 1911).
Ewart Monument, Castle Esplanade, Edinburgh. (Martin Hillman)
3. Major-Gen H.T. Siborne (ed.), Waterloo Letters, (London: Cassell and co., 1891), p. 57.
4. Mackenzie Macbride (ed.), ‘A Hero of Waterloo’, ‘With Napoleon at Waterloo’ and other unpublished documents of the Waterloo and Peninsular Campaigns (London: Francis Griffiths, 1911).
5. Gareth Glover (ed.), The Waterloo Archive Volume 1V: The British Sources (Barnsley: Frontline Books, 1999).
6. Charles Dalton, Waterloo Roll Call (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1904).
7. Major-Gen H.T. Siborne (ed.), Waterloo Letters, p. 69.
8. Return of killed, wounded and missing. Captain W. Siborne, History of the Waterloo Campaign (First published 1848; London: Greenhill Books, 1990), Appendix XXXVl.
9. Major-Gen H.T. Siborne (ed.), Waterloo Letters, p. 19.
10. Captain Rees Howell Gronow, Reminiscences of Captain Gronow (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1862).
11. James Paterson, Autobiographical Reminiscences (Glasgow: Maurice Ogle, 1871, American Libraries), pp. 205–13.
12. Richard Lawson, A History of Flixton, Urmston and Davyhulme (Urmston: Richard Lawson, 1898), p. 115.
13. STV News, 24 May 2013, www.news.stv.tv.