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  St James’s Church, Clerkenwell, where Stiles was buried.

  The register of deaths shows Stiles went to his grave still claiming he captured the eagle.

  By the early nineteenth century Clerkenwell had become fashionable with artisans and professionals, attracted by the large houses. However, it had seriously declined as a place to live by the time Stiles died. It was crime ridden, and overcrowded with terraces in multiple occupation. Spa Fields, where civil unrest broke out on 2 December 1816, was just around the corner, as well as the Clerkenwell House of Correction (prison).

  Stiles lived in Gloucester Street, now renamed Gloucester Way. The old Georgian terraces were bomb-damaged in the Second World War, and many were swept away in the 1950s passion for slum clearance, which often did more damage to the urban landscape than the Luftwaffe. Stiles’s house went the same way. It was replaced by an uncompromising block of council flats for social housing.

  Islington remained rundown until the late twentieth century, when it was rediscovered by the professional classes – particularly the media (and Tony Blair) – and then it began its renaissance. The area where Stiles lived was gentrified, as part of sought-after Islington, handy for the City, with a slightly bohemian feel. Today, a six-bed Georgian terraced house near the street where Stiles lived in Clerkenwell can fetch £4.2 million.

  I found the church where Stiles was buried is still there. It had a number of graveyards, but Stiles’s headstone, if he had one, has been cleared away. The graveyard around the church has been turned into a rough patch of grass and a playground. Some of the Georgian and Victorian headstones have been used as paving slabs around the edges of the open space, but if his is there, I could not read it. I found one with a barely legible inscription, green with moss and worn beyond recognition by the weather and the tread of feet. Stiles is so completely forgotten, even senior members of the church are unaware that they have a hero buried somewhere in their trendy patch of London.

  But I did find the register in which Stiles’s burial was recorded. The pages for January 1838 provide an insight into life in Clerkenwell in the new Victorian era (Queen Victoria succeeded to the throne the year before). Several of the dead are in their twenties, and there is a child of two years. Just above Stiles’s name is a prisoner who died in jail; we do not know how. His name was Michael Toomy; he died aged 22 and his address was given as the House of Correction. Stiles took his claim to his grave. Below Toomy’s entry in the parish register, the curate has written in a flowing hand, ‘Francis Stiles captor of an Eagle at the great Battle of Waterloo’.1

  Notes

  * He signed himself ‘Stiles’. Siborne spelled his surname as ‘Styles’, which has caused confusion ever since.

  * John Snow pioneered the science of epidemiology in 1854 when he drew up a map of cholera deaths around Broad Street in Soho and deduced they were caused by the public water pump. Disabling it helped to cut the number of deaths. A pub near the site – now called Broadwick Street – is named after him.

  1. Register of Burials, January 1828, St James’s Church, Clerkenwell.

  5

  ‘SCOTLAND FOREVER!’ – ENSIGN EWART

  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

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sp; 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 …