plate to him. It bore the following inscription: 'This service of plate was presented to General Sir George Beckwith, K.B., late Governor of Barbadoes, by the legislature of the island, as a sincere mark of the high regard and esteem in which he has been and will always continue to be held by every inhabitant of Barbadoes. A.D. 1814.'
Sir George Beckwith's military services were further recognised by the king conferring on him armorial distinctions, 'Issuant from a mural crown, a dexter arm embowed, encircled with a wreath of laurel, the hand grasping an eagle, or French standard, the staff broken.' In October 1816 he was appointed to the command of the forces in Ireland, which he retained till March, 1820, and died in his house in Half Moon Street in London on 20 March 1823, in the seventieth year of his age.
[Gent. Mag. xciii. part i. 372; Schombergh's History of Barbadoes, p. 373; Annual Register, 1809, li. 488; Records of the 37th Regiment; Army List.]
BECKWITH, JOHN CHARLES (1789–1862), a distinguished Peninsular officer and in later life the benevolent missionary to the Waldenses, was the grandson of Major-general John Beckwith, and nephew of the
generals, Sir George [q. v.] and Sir Thomas
Sydney Beckwith [q. v.]. His father, like his
four brothers, had held a commission in the
army, but had soon resigned it on his marriage with Miss Haliburton of Halifax in Nova
Scotia (a sister of Judge Haliburton), and
had settled in that colony. Charles Beckwith
was born 2 Oct. 1789, and obtained an ensigncy through his uncle's influence in the
50th regiment in 1803. In 1804 he exchanged
into the 95th or rifle regiment, of which his
uncle, Sydney Beckwith, was lieutenant-colonel. He became lieutenant in 1805, and
accompanied his regiment to Hanover, to
Denmark, where he was present at Kioge,
and to Portugal. He was with the 95th all
through the retreat of Sir John Moore to
Corunna, and became captain in 1808. He
was engaged with the 2nd battalion of his
regiment in the Walcheren expedition, and
afterwards accompanied it to Portugal in the
winter of 1810, when he found Lord Wellington's army in the lines of Torres Vedras,
and his uncle, Sydney Beckwith, in command of a brigade. He was present with
the light division in all the engagements
which took place with Masséna's retiring
army in the spring of 1811, at Pombal, Redinha, Condeixa, Foz d'Aronce, and Sabugal.
In 1812, after his uncle had gone to England
for his health, he was appointed by Brigadier-general Andrew Barnard, who had succeeded
him, brigade-major to the 1st brigade of the
celebrated light division, and was present
in that capacity at the storming of Ciudad
Rodrigo and Badajoz, and at the battles of
Salamanca, Vittoria, the Pyrenees, the Nivelle, the Nive, and Orthes. His eminent
services drew upon him the repeated notice
both of Lord Wellington and of General
Alten, who had succeeded Craufurd in the
command of the light division, and he was
appointed deputy assistant quartermaster-general to the division. In this higher capacity he was present at the battle of Toulouse,
and in 1814, at the conclusion of the war, he
was made major by brevet. In 1815 he was
appointed in the same capacity to Picton's
division in the Netherlands, and was present
at the battle of Waterloo, where he lost his
leg, and after which he was promoted lieutenant-colonel and made a C.B. The loss of
his leg made it impossible for him to expect
active employment, and in 1820 he went on
half-pay.
He had been but twenty-six years old at the battle of Waterloo, and was still but a young man when he retired, and hardly knew to what occupation a one-legged man could turn, when he happened one day in 1827, while waiting in the library of Apsley House, to look into Dr. Gilly's book on the Waldenses. He was so much interested that in the same year he paid a visit to the valleys of Piedmont. The past history of the people and their then condition of squalor and ignorance so worked upon his nature that he determined to settle among them, and, taking a house called La Torre, lived among them during the last thirty-five years of his life. His two main aims were to educate the people and to arouse in them once more the old evangelical faith which had first attracted his fancy. To educate them he established no less than 120 schools in the district, all of which he himself perpetually inspected, and the one-legged English general was well known and much loved throughout the Italian valleys. The greatness of his services was recognised by King Charles Albert of Sardinia, who mode him a knight of the order of St. Maurice and St. Lazarus in 1848, and he further sealed his life to his work by marrying a Waldensian girl, named Caroline Valle, in 1850. Nevertheless he kept up his communications with England, and frequently corresponded with Dr. Gilly and others interested in the Waldenses. An especially interesting letter from him to Sir William Napier is published in Nopier's 'Life,' in which he acknowledges the receipt of a copy of the 'History of the Peninsular War,' and