Lord George fixed him keenly. ‘And then I would have you go at once to Hounslow and take command. I told you yesterday: it will be three months at least before there’s a new lieutenant-colonel. And frankly, Hervey, with things the way they are here and abroad, a very great deal of trouble there may be during that time.’
Hervey stood silent. Only days ago he faced court martial; now he was to take command of his regiment. The fortunes of soldiering were ever changing, and rarely predictable – but never so surprising.
A very great deal of trouble there may be during that time: he knew it as well as did Lord George. As a Christian man he would pray for peace in the months ahead, but as an officer with ambition he might hope otherwise.
HISTORICAL AFTERNOTE
Lieutenant-General Sir William Clinton’s intervention force, which began landing at Lisbon on Christmas Day 1826, comprised four squadrons of cavalry, four companies of artillery, two battalions of Guards, seven battalions of Foot, a company of the Royal Staff Corps (engineers), and a detachment of the Royal Waggon Train – around five thousand men in all – with a naval squadron under command of Nelson’s famous flag captain, Rear-Admiral Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy. Meanwhile, the Miguelites had mounted another invasion of the northern provinces of Minho and Tras os Montes, and so in the middle of January 1827 Clinton marched north to the Mondego river – as the Duke of Wellington had almost twenty years before – and with this strong force to underwrite their counter-offensive, loyal Portuguese troops were able to eject the invaders. Then at the end of April, sixteen hundred of the two-thousand-strong garrison at Elvas mutinied, subverted by Miguelites at Badajoz and encouraged by a whole corps of the Spanish army mustered menacingly at the frontier. The mutiny was put down smartly, however, by the fortress commander, the admirable General Caula, and the country began to quieten once more. Clinton was able to withdraw to the area of the old Lines of Torres Vedras, although the fortifications were in a very poor state, and there his force remained until the late summer, when they moved into quarters in Lisbon, Belem and Mafra – all without firing a single shot.
On 20 January 1827, the Duke of York’s funeral took place at Windsor. The day was so bitter chill, and the proceedings so prolonged, that several of the mourners succumbed: at least two bishops are said to have died on their way home. The Foreign Secretary, Mr Canning, caught a severe cold which turned to inflammation of the lungs and liver. When in April therefore, after Lord Liverpool died of a stroke, he became Prime Minister, Canning was already a sick man. He lasted only until August, when he too died. Viscount Goderich succeeded him. Goderich, however, could not hold his cabinet together, and resigned the following January, whereupon the Duke of Wellington became Prime Minister. The duke, never having been much of a believer in the Portuguese intervention, and as former commander-in-chief knowing the strain which it placed on the army, soon recalled General Clinton’s five thousand. The Miguelites seized power not long after, Dom Pedro brought an army from Brazil, and there began the protracted – but in truth remarkably unbloody – ‘War of the Two Brothers’.
The British intervention was testament to the efficacy of a bold and timely foreign policy, but also to the ultimate futility of intervention without the military means to sustain it. Then, as now, the British army simply did not have enough soldiers.
THE GREEK ACROSTIC
Here is a brief explanation of the Greek acrostic used by Matthew Hervey to communicate the password ‘Napoleon’ to Colonel Laming. Taking the Greek transliteration of Napoleon and removing the initial letter for each subsequent word, the sentence is formed: ‘Napoleon, the destroyer of whole cities, was the lion of his people.’
NAΠOΛEΩN AΠOΛEΩN ΠOΛEΩN OΛEΩN AEΩN EΩN ΩN
Written in lower case, with full accents and breathings:
transliteration of Napoleon accented on the analogy of .
strictly speaking the future participle of – I destroy, hence about to destroy. But future participles are sometimes used with no real future sense; as a participle it ought to be followed by an accusative, but the genitive could be justified on the grounds that the participle has effectively become a noun – destroyer (of).
genitive plural of – city.
a fudge: it should really be (feminine genitive plural of – whole). The ending including an epsilon might be possible as a dialect form, but the word is readily recognizable, and it would be easy to parallel the general phenomenon of variant endings or the assimilation of an ending to that of an adjacent word.
nominative singular – lion.
masculine genitive plural of – his own (as in Latin, supplying people is a very common idiom).
present participle of – I am, hence being, but very common as idiom for is/was.
I am grateful for the erudition of Dr John Taylor, head of classics at Tonbridge, author of Greek to GCSE (Bristol Classical Press/Duckworth) and New Testament Greek: A Reader (Cambridge University Press).
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