If it’s 18 June, it must be 208 years since Lt-Col. Frederick Cavendish-Ponsonby had about as bad a day as one could have at the Battle of Waterloo without actually dying. He was slashed with sabres, speared with a lance, robbed while lying on the ground, and trampled by horses.
He gave an account of his travails which was reproduced in The Waterloo Roll Call, with biographical notes and anecdotes (1904), by Charles Dalton, FRGS:
‘Coquin’ means rascal, rogue, or scoundrel, which does sound a bit tame, but maybe that’s just how he reported it. Anyway, he quite reasonably thought he was done for:
“My head dropped” (wrote Ponsonby in his subsequent narrative of his experiences), “the blood gushed into my mouth, a difficulty of breathing came on, and I thought all was over.” But the bitterness of death was not yet past. Soon after, a tirailleur came up and roughly searched him all over, robbing Ponsonby of what money he had about him. He was hardly quit of this scoundrel before another appeared with the same intent. At last a good Samaritan appeared in the shape of a French officer, who administered brandy to the apparently dying English- man, and then passed on “to pursue the retreating British”!
Then another ‘tirailleur’ (skirmisher) used him as a human shield:
…came and knelt and fired over me, loading and firing many times, and conversing with great gaiety all the while. At last he ran off.
But, as I suggested at the top, this was not the final indignity
Finally, in the morning, he was “removed in a cart to a farmhouse”, which must have been bloody agony in itself, “and laid in a bed from which poor Sir A. Gordon had just been carried out dead”. Then, what passed for medical science at the time came into play.
Somehow, he had the strength not just to survive this, but to go on to be Major-General Sir Frederick Cavendish Ponsonby, K.C.B., K.M.T., Governor of Malta, husband to Lady Emily (daughter of the Earl of Bathurst), and father of six.
And if you think his life was eventful, his sister was Lady Caroline Lamb, who had an affair with Byron, wrote a gothic novel (‘Glenarvon’) about him, and may have come up with the phrase “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” to describe him.
