Yorkshire Almanac Death of “York’s last Waterloo hero”

15 September 1872: Death of “York’s last Waterloo hero”

York Herald. 1821/09/21. Death of a Veteran. York. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

If an excerpt is used in the book, it will be shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.

We have to record the death on Sunday last, at his residence, Fossgate, York, at the age of 82, of Henry Hoare, late of the 15th Hussars. Deceased entered the army in 1810, and served in the Peninsular campaign. He was present at the battle of Vittoria and the siege of Badajoz. He was wounded at Orthes, and was present at the battle of Toulouse. He also served in the campaign of 1815, and was present at Waterloo; and we believe he is the last Waterloo hero who resided in the city.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Comment

I think the siege of Badajóz would have been the third of that name during the Peninsular War. Hoare’s regiment played a key role in the Peterloo Massacre, four years after Waterloo. Was he there, doing rather less for the cause of freedom?

Via John Bibby, who comments:

York Cemetery records three “other ranks” from York who served at Waterloo – James Scargill (1793-1875), Henry Hoare (1793-1872), and Thomas Nicholson (1790-1850) – but of these only Henry Hoare receives mention in the York press, and Henry has to wait until he dies …, sandwiched under “Local News” between mentions of the Royal Albert Asylum for Idiots in Lancaster and the Wesleyan Prayer Leaders’ Tea in New Street Chapel (Bibby 2022)

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Comment

Via John Bibby, who comments:

York Cemetery records three “other ranks” from York who served at Waterloo – James Scargill (1793-1875), Henry Hoare (1793-1872), and Thomas Nicholson (1790-1850) – but of these only Henry Hoare receives mention in the York press, and Henry has to wait until he dies …, sandwiched under “Local News” between mentions of the Royal Albert Asylum for Idiots in Lancaster and the Wesleyan Prayer Leaders’ Tea in New Street Chapel (Bibby 2022)

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Similar

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1 August 1813: The Leeds-based 51st Foot wear bay leaves, not white roses, on Minden (now Yorkshire) Day, as they drive Napoleon’s troops back over the Pyrenees

23 May 1793: The 14th Foot, predecessors of the West Yorkshire Regiment, chant a French Revolutionary song as they storm enemy trenches at Famars (Valenciennes)

11 November 1918: George Ellison of Richmond Hill, Leeds, is the last British soldier to be killed in action in the First World War

17 July 1815: John Dunhill and William Bewell stand trial for their lives shortly after Waterloo, accused of the riotous demolition of a press-gang pub at 41, Humber Street, Hull

3 December 1816: A revolutionary bread riot is averted at Sheffield

16 August 1819: James Lees of Saddleworth (West Riding) attends a public meeting in favour of male suffrage at St Peter’s Square, Manchester – Peterloo

7 April 1812: Sheffield cemetery builders and metal-workers riot on market day against potato price inflation

4 January 1813: Alexander Thomson, Baron of the Exchequer, fires the Georgian state’s opening salvo in the great trial at York of Luddites from the West Riding

7 January 1813: In a novelisation of the Luddite murder of Marsden textile manufacturer William Horsfall, a local Baptist minister, Abraham Webster, reports on his execution-eve visit to George Mellor in York Castle

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Comment

Some background to the novel:

D. F. E. Sykes, a Huddersfield solicitor married to the daughter of an Anglican clergyman, focused in Ben o’ Bills, The Luddite, which the author claimed to be based on oral testimony and ‘mostly true’, on a fictional family, the Bamforths, connected with the Particular Baptists at Powle Moor, near Slaithwaite, where the minister, Abraham Webster, was so decidedly against the new machines that old Mrs Bamforth ‘died in the belief that the curse of Scripture was upon them’. George Mellor, a cousin of the Bamforths in the novel, enters the story on Christmas Eve, 1811, intoning the first verse of ‘Christians Awake’. He goes along with the rest of the family to Christmas morning service at Slaithwaite Church, where ‘near all Slaithwaite’ had gathered ‘Methodies and Baptists and all; and even folk that went nowhere, Owenites they called them’, who ‘made a point of going to church that one morning of the year’. Mellor, who occasionally speaks in moderate tones, but elsewhere gives vent to Painite anti-clerical and republican sentiments, is portrayed presiding at a Luddite oath-taking ceremony with a Bible to hand. He refers to Benjamin Walker, the accomplice who betrayed him, whose family Sykes also links with the Baptists at Powle Moor, as a ‘Judas’, He is visited twice in his York prison cell by Abraham Webster, who prays with him on the eve of his execution. According to Sykes, this final pastoral visit inspired Mellor to offer words of forgiveness for his enemies from the scaffold, though Sykes was clearly using dramatic licence in allowing Webster to lead the singing of a Methodist hymn at Mellor’s execution, since all the contemporary accounts record this as a feature of the execution of another group of Luddites. At the end of the novel, Soldier Jack, a former militia-man-turned-Luddite, reflecting on Mellor’s fate, philosophizes: ‘”Yo’re dissenters at th’ Powle … an’ … if there’d been no dissenters there’d been no Luds, ‘an George Mellor ‘d noan ha’ danced out 0′ th’ world on nowt”‘.

Much of the background to Sykes’s novel is authentic, as are several of the key characters, including Abraham Webster, the Baptist minister at Powle Moor, the Reverend Charles Chew, the curate at Slaithwaite and the Luddites George Mellor and Benjamin Walker. A succession of popular evangelical Calvinistic Anglican curates in the Venn tradition at Slaithwaite and the reluctance of the earls of Dartmouth to release land on their estates for the building of Nonconformist places of worship had delayed the local development of both Wesleyanism and Dissent, a factor of which Sykes was clearly aware in his reconstruction of popular religion in the Colne Valley. In fact, no Wesleyan chapel was built at Slaithwaite until 1839, though a chapel had been opened in 1810 at Linthwaite, the first to be built in the Colne Valley, and cottage meetings were begun at Marsden in the same year. The Baptist secession had occurred as recently as 1787 and the Powle Moor Chapel was built· three years later on moorland waste in the neighbouring township of Scammonden, having been denied building land on the Dartmouth estates in the Colne Valley. The most recent historians of the chapel have, however, found no evidence in the chapel records to corroborate the links between Sykes’s characters and the chapel and dismissed Sykes’s account as purely fictional.
(Hargreaves 1990)

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