Marshal Ney Was Not Scottish

A mistake 200 years in the making

12 min readSep 30, 2017

If the title of this article means absolutely nothing to you then I wouldn’t be surprised as I’m addressing two historic conspiracy theories that have been lain end to end. They have been promoted by the Smith Gallery and Museum in Stirling and reported in the Daily Record. Whether you’re a fan of Marshal Ney, Scotland or alternative history; let’s enjoy this public domain image together and then, if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to eat this myth from nose to tail.

Marshal Michel Ney by François Gérard, 1805

If you happen to be from North Carolina you might have heard of the school teacher Peter Stewart Ney, who died in 1846 and was buried in Rowan County at the Third Creek Presbyterian Church under a monument claiming that he was really Michel Ney. The son of a French barrel cooper who became the right hand of Napoleon Bonaparte during France’s Revolutionary Wars. As a soldier, Ney earned the sobriquet Le Brave des Braves and his personal legend ends in compelling tragedy as he sought death at Waterloo. Refusing to retreat and after fighting until his sword broke, Ney proclaimed: “Come and see how a Marshal of France meets death!” After this final defeat, Ney was arrested, blamed for Napoleon’s return and was shot for treason in 1815, making him a martyr of the failed Bonaparte cause. During the 19th century, Ney became a heroic subject of art and fiction; in the Second Empire, he was reestablished as a national hero and in some parts his story continued after death with a whisper that became a cry: Marshal Ney lives!

Marshal Ney had faked his own death by firing squad, Freemasons then spirited him away to the Carolinas where Bonaparte sympathisers helped him to start a new life as Peter Stewart Ney. This Peter Ney really existed and he gave conflicting accounts of his past. Sometimes, when intoxicated, he would let slip that he had served under Napoleon and those who knew him had no reason to doubt his word. In 1846, on his deathbed, Peter Ney proclaimed that he was indeed Napoleon’s great Marshal and could not stand to die without making the truth known. Following Peter Ney’s death his story was literally set in stone and spread as truth by the people who remembered him. Historic Doubts as to the execution of Marshal Ney by James Weston, published in 1895 gives a comprehensive theory (as the title suggests) of irregularities surrounding Marshal Ney’s death and attempts to present as a matter of historical fact that he lived on as Peter Ney.

Weston was certainly correct that Marshal Ney’s execution was irregular; he was shot before dawn, according to eyewitnesses he fell forward rather than be pushed backward by the musket volley and no coup-de-grâce was delivered following the shooting. The rush to carry out the sentence is easily explained as his trial was politically charged, Marshal Ney was being scapegoated by a court that arguably (and so Ney’s lawyer argued) lacked jurisdiction to do so. A military court had already refused to try Marshal Ney and there was a chance of his conviction in the Chamber of Peers being challenged. The fragile restored monarchy was eager to put its boot down before public sympathy swung back to Bonapartism again so Ney was shot in the dark to avoid a spectacle. The other two points are grim details of the method of execution and I don’t want to dwell on dehumanising close analysis. Suffice to say that being shot with ten muskets does not necessarily push a large man backwards and while a final shot to the heart is often delivered to the victim of a firing squad it can be withheld if the victim is killed outright.

While staging an execution is certainly possible so is carrying out a real one even if it is done so unjustly. Weston had a tendency to be selective about which claims he challenged and which he accepted. He favoured the survival theory influenced by a romantic streak that he shared with Peter Ney’s other adherents and that Peter Ney instilled in his students.

In 1908 a former pupil, James Foote, provided a fond reminiscence of his school days in which he details some of the traits that no doubt enabled the teacher to claim Marshal Ney’s legacy. He was tall and heavily built, battle scarred and with thinning red hair, he was a great rider and a fine poet. One notable episode of Peter Ney’s career is his victory over a French fencing master, a feat that echoed his namesake, as the young Michel Ney also distinguished himself by defeating an arrogant fencing instructor. This story comes second hand from Foote, who heard it from another former pupil, identified as General James Cook. The account contains the irregularity that Peter Ney chose to fight with a “short broad-sword” but Marshal Ney was a hussar (light cavalryman) and would probably have fought with a curved sabre. As an experienced swordsman Marshal Ney could no doubt fight with a broadsword if he wanted to and “broad-sword” is a vague term but the story (and another in Weston’s book) insists Peter Ney favoured such a weapon and I am aware of no evidence that Marshal Ney did as well.

This is not the kind of inconsistency that indicates bad faith or wilful deceit but a desire to believe. Some said Peter Ney’s refined intellect proved his true greatness while others contested that Michel Ney was an illiterate French peasant and therefore Peter Ney could not be him. This was not exactly correct nor was it disproof but the kind of folklore that spreads in a spirit of admiration rather than dishonesty. Weston likewise was no charlatan and devoted years of his life to gathering evidence, eager to confirm Peter Ney’s claims. He recorded notes written by Peter Ney, often in shorthand, in which he gave his own accounts of Marshal Ney’s career. For example: In Walter Scott’s The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Peter Ney annotates his own remembrance of a certain event, the capture of a Russian officer, where Scott claims the officer was allowed to go free. Scott’s history was extensively researched through primary sources and correspondence with eye witnesses but suppose it could be proven incontrovertibly that Peter Ney was Marshal Ney; well then his testimony would be compelling but it would only be his viewpoint and not alone sufficient to overturn historical orthodoxy.

Conflicting viewpoints are commonplace in the study of history, Ney was killed or Ney survived, to favour one position or the other corroboration is essential and Weston’s work is an inundation of circumstantial evidence. When taken all together it certainly attests to the greatness of Peter Ney but the case for him being Marshal Ney is only chimerical. As with any good conspiracy theory the logic is ultimately circular so that lack of clear evidence is presented as the decisive argument; after all the real Marshal Ney would never want his identity to be proved. The central problem of the Weston’s theory is that he requires Peter Ney to be an impossibly reliable witness and Weston’s protestations of Peter Ney’s excellent and reliable character only prove his (understandable) conformation bias.

Whoever he really was Peter Ney was determined to live up to the legend of the bravest of the brave, to simply call him a fraud would be to do him a disservice. To his students, Peter Ney represented a connection to greatness, if the first Marshal Ney could finish his career in rural North Carolina then his successor could surely originate there. To men like Weston, Peter Ney was the symbol of Napoleon’s lost cause and there was another lost cause in North Carolina, one in which many of Peter Ney’s students and Weston himself had served. If the former cause could be returned to life then maybe the latter could too and in the Old South the spirit of Marshal Ney could defy history, defeat and even death.

Execution of Marshal Ney by Jean-Léon Gérôme , 1868

Now we come to Scotland via Connecticut and the work of a man called William Henry Hoyt, a lawyer and self professed lover of the “Old North State”. He lacked the romanticism of Weston and undertook research with a determination to reach historical truth even when it led to disappointment. He researched and published a book about the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, which he had started in the hopes of proving the revolutionary document was genuine but came to conclude that it was spurious.

In the interest of improving North Carolina’s historiography, Hoyt also studied Peter Ney and tried to establish his past before 1815. Peter Ney had often claimed his mother was named Stewart (or Stuart, the source of his middle name) and that he was born near Sir John Graham’s castle in Scotland. Hoyt’s research led him to old parish records in Scotland and he found that an infant Peter McNee (or McCNee) was baptised in Fintry Parish, in Stirlingshire, in 1788, son of John McNee and Isabel (Isbal) Stewart. Fintry Parish Church, which was rebuilt c.1800 but by all accounts hasn’t moved for centuries, is just a few miles from the medieval ruins of Sir John de Graham’s Castle. It seems that this was very likely that this was the true origin of Peter Ney. Hoyt had all the makings of an alternative explanation but did not publish a book, possibly due to a lack of linking evidence to prove that Peter McNee traveled to America or that Peter Ney had ever gone by another name.

To some historians the legend is laid to rest here but to others the connection Hoyt established is only the beginning. Now we go through the looking glass to the latest incarnation of the Peter Ney legend, the all encompassing version of history that holds every contingency to be correct. That Peter McNee’s liberal political views led him from rural Scotland to revolutionary France. That he changed his name to Michel Ney and became one of Napoleon’s Marshals. After Waterloo he was forced to fake his own death and flee to North Carolina, where he changed identity again and lived out his days as Peter Ney. This is the version of the legend that has bothered me for years, since it’s appearance in a 2009 Daily Record Article. I have dismissed it in the past as the kind of theory nobody would believe but it came back and with the (at least tacit) support of Stirling’s Smith Museum. I fear that Peter Ney conspiracies could weave themselves into folk history here just as they once did in North Carolina.

The origins of this version of the Peter Ney story lie with Weston, many of Peter Ney’s acquaintances were willing to believe the famous Marshal was of Scottish ancestry. While some of Peter Ney’s contemporary Carolinian’s may have known no better, the more curious may have eventually read Memoir’s of Marshal Ney Published by His Family and realised the two accounts were impossibly contradictory.

Michel Ney of Saarlouis joined the French army in 1787, the year Peter McNee was probably born, so in order to have become Marshal in 1804 (aged 17), Peter McNee would need to have distinguished himself at the Battle of Neuwied aged only 10 (putting Joan of Arc to shame). Had Michel Ney been a child soldier I would have expected his colleagues to have noticed, had McNee arrived later and tried to fabricate a past then he would have needed to fool all his contemporaries and all historians since. Where did Peter McNee find time to do this in addition to being a scholar, a radical, a general, a father and a Freemason all before he faked his death at the age of 28? Weston’s theory, while compelling, relied on heavily selective evidence but this one is totally untenable.

If Hoyt was wrong or the archive contains an error then the whole Scottish connection evaporates. Peter Ney could have been a different Peter McNee: For example, the infant baptised in Port of Menteith in 1780, who also had a mother with the maiden name Stewart, but even he would have been 7 or 8 years old when he traveled to France and joined the cavalry under the assumed name Michel Ney. Rather than invent the character from scratch a Peter McNee (or anyone else) could plausibly have replaced the original Michel Ney at some point. The best time to do this would probably have been after Michel Ney’s death. The best place would be somewhere nobody knew Michel Ney or at least had not seen him for years. Somewhere like North Carolina, where a tall red-haired foreigner might reinvent himself and take after his hero.

There was a Peter McNee who fought at Waterloo, if Peter McNee had been a heavy cavalryman, one of the famous Scots Greys, he would have fought with a straight broadsword, been a strong horseman and borne the wounds of his battles both in body and mind. Just as Weston witnessed the surrender of General Lee first hand, maybe Peter McNee saw the real Marshal Ney lead the French cavalry charge or his final attempt to rally the Old Guard. Maybe the news that this brave man had been executed moved Peter McNee, maybe he reflected on his own experience of being unable to resume civilian life in Scotland. Feeling rejected by the country he fought for, maybe Peter McNee sought a fresh beginning, he traveled far away and rewrote his troubled past.

This is of course all speculation and I only present it because I, like Weston, have found the romance of Peter Ney’s story infectious, I would like to believe he was a warrior poet, I would like to believe he was a Scot. Scotland has lost causes of its own; from Sir John de Graham, who fought and died alongside William Wallace, to The Great Montrose who sacrificed himself for such a fine point of principle in his time that it is now quite difficult to explain. Not to mention the Jacobite Rising of 1745, just a generation before Michel Ney’s birth, the lost cause of Charles Edward Stuart who’s name Peter Stewart Ney also chose to adopt.

In the 1890s Peter Ney became the conduit by which a mythic past was channeled into North Carolina’s present. A time when the narrative of the American Civil War was rewritten as the “Lost Cause of the Confederacy”, the revision that turned slavers into tragic heroes. Now, as the myth eats its own tail, Peter Ney can do for Stirlingshire’s school children what he did for his own students. He can inspire a revolutionary spirit that erases the failures of the past, that reminds us that sometimes the losers were on the right side of history. 200 years after Michel Ney’s execution we saw the Peter Ney myth return, why might a story like his come to prominence in Scotland in 2015?

Hoyt and Weston could both be wrong, I don’t mean to present their findings as either/or and I’m not denying the place of romance and imagination when it comes to how we relate to the past. History is about orthodoxy and revision, a living science that often bends and stretches, our knowledge is challenged, our outlook is challenged. All political positions have a preferred version of history and to insist that the subject be taught apolitically is simply an authoritarian stance in favour of the status quo. That said, the last thing Scotland needs is even an iota of Dixie nostalgia being co-opted into the nationalist movement. When we look at history we keep in mind a distinction between what is probably true and what we want to be true. What the Smith Museum’s researchers are asking me to believe, well it reminds me of a story about Peter Ney:

He was once given a fine sword and when asked his opinion, the schoolmaster looked it over and said it reminded him of his own sword; a Damascus steel blade that was so supple it could fold in half and spring back to its original shape. To the dismay (and delight) of those assembled Peter Ney proceeded to demonstrate with the sword he was holding and snapped it in two. It is worth saying again that while stories like these may not be fact they tell us of the true Peter Ney, not a fake Marshal but a quixotic living legend. He may not have stood for his country with a broken sword but he did make a globe out of a pumpkin so he could teach children about world geography. He is not just remembered for his eccentricity but for his greatness as an educator. Peter Ney, wherever he came from, was a far better man than he aspired to be, let’s not bend his legacy past breaking point.