by Mark Zuehlke
Munbee soon succumbed to the common temptation of absentee colonial estate holders by living far beyond his means. To cover the growing debts, he mortgaged the estate several times over. Young Henry was oblivious to the brewing calamity of this financial recklessness, revelling in the idyllic environment of Prinknash Park, a Cotswold country manor four miles from Gloucester that Munbee rented. Here he frolicked through a small beech forest, doing his best to escape attempts by Munbee and the local curate to instill the beginnings of an education—a process complicated by the fact that the Goulburns followed the fashion of the times for nobility of speaking French at home, so that the boy was more conversant in this language than in English. He was also given to tantrums, resulting in long periods of incarceration in his room that interrupted his education. When Henry turned seven he was packed off to Dr. Moore’s School in Sunbury and surprisingly discovered that his English and Latin equalled that of the other students. But his “passionate” temper remained, marked by impetuosity and rebelliousness that got him into constant trouble.
Then his father died, and Susannah’s comfortable life collapsed as Munbee’s many debts were called in and she was forced to sell his personal property and cast the family’s affairs to the Court of Chancery for disposition. At the same time her health, always frail, began to decline. While waiting for the grindingly slow court determination on what, if any, of the estate in Jamaica would remain hers, Susannah was by stages forced to find more modest residences. Years dragged by and circumstances only worsened, while the court was closed more often than engaged in deliberations over the many such cases lying before it. Eventually, through the intervention of family friend Matthew Montagu, Spencer Perceval—then a prominent lawyer—helped negotiate their case through the court. Seeing much potential in the young lad, Montagu also took an interest in Henry’s future.
At sixteen, Henry began studying for the entrance exams to Trinity College, Cambridge. Upon his father’s death, he had undergone a distinct character change. As his mother’s health worsened, the bouts of sickness becoming more extended, Henry had quietly assumed the role of head of the household, to the point of even supervising the business management of the Jamaican estate. In Matthew Montagu the teenager found a father figure, the man showing uncommon integrity that Goulburn sought to emulate.
By the end of 1801, Goulburn matriculated and was admitted to Trinity. He studied hard, but was handicapped by having had no consistent tutoring or schooling during his childhood. There was also the problem of poverty relative to his peers. While there was sufficient money to cover tuition, Goulburn carefully concealed the fact that there was no butler to clean his clothes or servant to prepare the family breakfast. Not long before graduating with an MA in 1808, Henry had to sell his mother’s dinnerware to raise sufficient money to provide her with an allowance capable of covering the cost of a small house in Phillimore Place, Kensington, where she could live out the last of her life in relative comfort.
Goulburn left Cambridge with an unremarkable academic record, a belief in evangelical Anglicanism that suited his deeply conservative world outlook, and vital links with men holding positions of power in the government that Montagu knew would serve the young man well in the future. Disinclined to enter into commerce or to return to Jamaica to directly oversee the plantation that now yielded an annual return after expenses of £2,000, Goulburn was drawn to public service. He naturally inclined this way, his religion and tutelage by Montagu having instilled in him the belief that this was a higher calling for a man of good character.
In 1807, he gained election to the House of Commons. “Opportunities for usefulness which were open to a politician seemed unlimited,” he wrote.6 Perceval was chancellor of the exchequer in Lord Palmerston’s government and held all the conservative values that Goulburn admired. Despite the erratic behaviour and moral dissolution of King George III, Goulburn believed in an unfaltering loyalty to the Crown and that the constitution was inviolable. The concessions to Roman Catholics, that benchmark of Castlereagh’s Irish policy, were anathema to the young man, nothing more than an invitation to growing radicalism that might plunge the country into the chaos of revolution that had befallen France in 1789. Goulburn’s evangelical Anglicanism was anti-libertarian. He believed that the individual cast adrift from the need to be obedient to traditional authority ultimately became distanced from God. Social order, after all, was God’s work. In entering politics, Goulburn sought “to maintain the established institutions of the Country, to advance the cause of Religion and Learning, and to uphold, as essential to both, the interests of the University and of the Established Church.”7
Goulburn’s initial performance in the House of Commons little marked him for advancement into offices of government service. It was two years before he gathered the nerve to speak, and his declamation failed to impress. But in 1809 he travelled to Spain and Portugal to witness firsthand the difficulties facing the campaign there. He returned with a distinct appreciation for the army’s difficulties and a disdain for the Spanish and Portuguese that served to confirm in his mind the superiority of the British over all others. Shortly after his return that winter, Goulburn was offered a position as Home Office undersecretary, which he accepted enthusiastically. While serving with distinction in this post, the young bachelor briefly lost his head over Lady Selina Stewart. Having never learned the suave ways of his university fellows, he tried clumsily to court her, without success. “I am always afraid of marriages that arise out of excited feeling or sudden impulse,” he later stated and made no further mistake in that regard. Instead, considering his debt to the Montagus beyond repayment, he sought the hand of their third daughter, eighteen-year-old Jane, hailed by friends as such “a captivating little soul” that she resembled a “wren.” It was widely predicted that the marriage would prove a grand success, with each bringing out the best in the other. Goulburn commented that it was her “strength of intellect, her warmth of affection, her strong religious feeling” that attracted him. They were married on December 20, 1811, and Spencer Perceval turned over his house to them for a brief Christmas honeymoon.8
Perceval’s assassination five months later stunned the young couple, who heard the news while on a late-afternoon carriage drive in St. James’s Park. They hurried home, and once Goulburn was sure that his wife had recovered from her initial attack of near-debilitating grief, he rushed to his office, only to find the home secretary personally interrogating the crazed murderer. Goulburn noted Bellingham’s “haggard countenance, his glaring eye, quivering lip and considered how short a time was to elapse before he would be called upon to answer before God for the crime which he had committed.” Later, Goulburn considered the fact that Bellingham was “taken, committed, tried, condemned, executed, dissected, all within one week from the time that he fired the shot” an overly hasty application of the King’s justice.9
With Perceval’s death, Goulburn’s future became uncertain. The Home Office received a new minister, Lord Sidmouth, who rewarded a member of his family with the undersecretary position. Goulburn was rescued from having to leave public service by Liverpool, who personally appointed him to replace Peel as the Colonial Department undersecretary. It was an attractive position that paid a handsome annual salary of £2,000, assuring financial security for as long as he held the post.10Goulburn was immediately impressed by Bathurst. As had been his inclination with Montagu, with the outgoing home secretary Richard Ryder, and with Perceval, Goulburn found in Bathurst a new father figure. That both men were staunch conservatives, who believed there was little chance for the improvement of the human race and that only institutions of social order suppressed its baser instincts, helped strengthen this almost immediate bond. Bathurst took a kindly interest in Goulburn and the younger man responded with intense loyalty.
Goulburn and Peel worked briefly together to ensure a smooth transition within the department, and Peel was greatly impressed. “He approaches the nearest to perfection,” Peel later observed.11
The distinct division of authority Castlereagh had instituted and which Bathurst reinforced was such that Goulburn soon “knew no more of what was going on in the War branch than any stranger unless during the absence of my Colleague [Henry Bunbury].”12This was often enough the case as Bunbury’s health was poor, requiring frequent convalescing. Also, as Bathurst sat in the House of Lords it fell to Goulburn to be the spokesman for the ministry in the House of Commons, so he had to keep abreast of its entire operation. Consequently Goulburn became rather an odd man out in the operational structure of the ministry, for he somewhat unwittingly was more fully informed and involved in its running than his superior likely intended.
Bathurst’s preoccupation was the war with France, so he expected Goulburn to oversee most colonial affairs while he exercised only “the most general form of supervision.”13 As such the twenty-eight-year-old was de facto head of the empire. And the most pressing colonial matter was the war with America.
Goulburn gave scant credence to American justifications for the war. After examining President Madison’s war message and the causes cited in it, Goulburn dismissed them as mere camouflage. He believed Madison conspired with Napoleon Bonaparte—the two men, or at least their governments, having a secret understanding where each would work assiduously to bring about Britain’s defeat. The seizure of parts of Spanish West Florida and the massing of troops on the Canadian border preparatory to an invasion there confirmed that the true American intent was conquest and expansion of territory at the cost of Britain and her Spanish ally. Like many Britons, Goulburn considered the American declaration of war a “stab in the back” at a time when Britain was locked in a life-and-death struggle to prevent world domination by Napoleonic France. Taking advantage of Britain’s desperate straits, America sought to conquer all British North America. That was “the real object of the war on the part of the United States.”14
Initially the situation in Canada looked grim. Sir George Prevost complained in one report after another about the general air of defeatism pervading Upper Canada and the low militia turnouts. He also fretted about the French Canadians in Lower Canada and how they might turn against the British at any moment. Goulburn read all these reports closely. As was his custom with most of the vast volume of documents arriving from all points of the empire, his replies were concisely written on a turned-up corner. Occasionally he jotted “Put-by” in the corner and set it aside so he could take time to reflect upon its contents. Rarely did he pass reports up to Bathurst for input, fulfilling to the letter his minister’s expectation that he should on his own initiative handle matters responsibly and efficiently. Like Bathurst, he seldom used departmental clerks to write responses, preferring instead to draft all dispatches in his own careful hand.
Prevost’s pessimism grated on Goulburn and he worried about the man’s competency while doing what he could to bolster the ability of the army in Canada to defend itself. In August he managed to gather up clothing and equipment to send to Canada sufficient to meet the needs of 800 men and diverted one of two heavily laden supply ships bound for Iberia instead to North America. He also authorized Prevost to offer 100 acres of land to each colonist who enlisted in the army. At the same time he fretted that the obvious need to use Indian warriors to meet the American threat would lead to wanton and unnecessary bloodshed that might hamper attempts to negotiate a peace settlement. The solution, Goulburn thought, was “to prevent the commission of those excesses which are so much to be apprehended from their Employment” by having the warriors serve only under the immediate direction of experienced Indian Department officers.15
That the help he could send to Prevost was terribly scant was not lost on the young bureaucrat and, given that British forces in Canada were badly outnumbered by the Americans, Goulburn was not optimistic they could hold out. Then, on October 7, a special messenger banged on the door of his residence in the middle of the night. An anxious Goulburn clambered out of bed and hastily read the report so urgently delivered. With relief the undersecretary saw that rather than news of disaster the note announced the surrender of the U.S. western army and Detroit to Brock. His spirits were momentarily buoyed but almost as quickly deflated by the grim news that the Americans had handed the Royal Navy a string of stinging defeats. On the streets the news of Brock’s victory was received with joy, but Goulburn noted that the “feeling in the British public in favour of the Navy rendered in their eyes the military triumph no compensation for the naval disaster.”16
A maritime nation possessed of the largest navy in European history, Britain took great pride in her naval prowess, accepting as cant that she could never be bested on the seas. Throughout October and November of 1812, however, the Admiralty received one report of defeat or failure after another that threatened to shatter this myth of invincibility.
The first calamity had befallen the frigate HMS Guerrière on August 19 about 400 miles south of Newfoundland, when she was intercepted by the 55-gun Constitution, crewed by 460 sailors commanded by Capt. Isaac Hull, whose uncle was in the process of surrendering Detroit. Aboard Guerrière, Capt. James R. Dacres considered the two ships evenly matched despite his being undermanned with a crew of only about 280 men and mounting just forty-nine cannon. For an hour the two ships jockeyed for advantage, with Guerrière firing two ineffective broadsides while Hull concentrated on closing the range so he could fire with effect. When Constitution was 50 to 60 yards from the British ship, Hull, who had drilled his gunners to an unusually high state of competency, opened with a broadside that flung more than 700 pounds of iron out of the guns per volley. The British return fire hurled back 550 pounds but was far less accurate. Few hits were scored, while the American broadsides hammered home.
A punishing duel ensued that left Guerrière’s hull holed in many places and her sails and rigging badly ripped. Fifteen minutes into the cannon exchange, the British mizzenmast suddenly collapsed, falling off the starboard quarter to hang into the sea. Hull immediately took advantage of Dacres’s inability to manoeuvre by swinging Constitution broadside to the British bow, from which only a few guns could be fired at the American ship, and raked Guerrière with heavy shot. Soon the fore and mainmasts crashed over the side and the ship rolled in the troughs so badly that seawater mixed together with the blood of the dead and wounded washed about on the main deck. With 15 crewmen dead and another 63 wounded, Dacres realized further resistance was suicidal and ordered the colours struck. The action had lasted two hours. Constitution lost only 7 sailors killed and 7 injured. Guerrière, however, would be no prize for Hull to parade into an American port. Her damage was so severe he had to take the surviving British sailors aboard and then burn the hulk.
News of this defeat reached London on the same day as word of the surrender of Detroit, but The Times gave prominence to the naval story. The “loss of the Guerrière spread a degree of gloom through the town, which it was painful to observe,” declared an editorial. The Times returned repeatedly to the defeat and with each setback on the seas asserted that Royal Navy captains who surrendered their ships were a disgrace to their service and that in the past they would have gone down with colours flying rather than strike. Although the paper continued to maintain that British sailors were the best in the world, it allowed that those from America were obviously next in superiority and worried that United States frigates were, in comparison to their British counterparts, “larger, finer, [and] better built.”17
Soon thereafter, Commodore John Rodgers returned to America with the fleet he had taken to sea without authorization on the day of the declaration of war. Although his seventy-day voyage had taken him within a day’s sail of the coast of England, Rodgers had failed to sight a single British warship except for early in the venture when he unsuccessfully attempted to capture the frigate Belvidera. He had, however, seized seven British merchant ships as prizes.
More bad news followed as the result of a contest between the British brig Frolic and the American sloop Wasp near the West
Indies reached London. Although the two ships were evenly matched with thirty guns each and a difference in crew size of 130 Americans to 120 British, Frolic was punished into surrendering after an action of only fifty minutes. British losses were 17 killed and 23 wounded while the American dead numbered 5 with another 5 wounded. That Wasp was captured in turn later that day and Frolic recovered by the British ship of the line Poictiers provided scant comfort to either the Admiralty or the public. The realization that the nation’s merchantmen were vulnerable to capture and her naval ships not invincible depressed British morale.18
In America the small victories at sea seemed weak tonic, deemed too little and too late in coming to enable President Madison to easily win re-election. After a mere four months of war fought with little enthusiasm, the nation was weary of the conflict. The growing anti-war movement blamed the entire affair on Madison and his administration, conveniently forgetting Congress’s role in forcing its declaration. Even those who believed the war just and necessary tended to lay responsibility for its poor prosecution on the steps of the White House.
TWELVE
Failures of Command
WINTER 1812–13
In the fall of 1812 President James Madison faced the curious situation of having a fellow Republican running against him for presidential office. DeWitt Clinton, the forty-three-year-old mayor of New York City, had ardently opposed President Thomas Jefferson’s policies and considered Madison a Jeffersonian pawn put into office merely to continue the “Virginian dynasty.” Once considered by many party insiders a strong presidential contender, Clinton’s vitriolic criticism of two successive Republican presidents had by 1812 reduced him to an outcast. He advanced himself for the party’s presidential nomination anyway, and the 1812 Republican caucus rejected him in an 82–0 vote that endorsed Madison for a second term. Undeterred, Clinton used his influence in New York to persuade Republicans in that state’s legislature to endorse his presidential candidacy in May with equal unanimity.
