The 2/9th were formed up in open column, towards the rear of the hill, as a reserve. Raised in 1804, the battalion had been stationed in England since formation. Almost all were strangers to the battlefield. As the French drew nearer, a hail of enemy shot and shell rained down to soften them up before the main infantry assault. ‘A young soldier is much more alarmed at a nine pounder shot passing within 4 yards of his head than he is of a bullet at a distance of as many inches,’ observed one volunteer, ‘although one would settle him as effectively as the other.’5 The temptation to duck or ‘bob’ was almost irresistible and as round shot pitched over the heads of the men, one private reflexively ducked. ‘Who is that I see bobbing there? What are you bobbing about, sir?’ shouted an officer. ‘Let me see you bob again, sir and I’ll …’ but he was cut short as a cannon ball skimmed his hat and he succumbed to the same instinct. ‘Who is that I see bobbing about, sir?’ the men jeered, as the officer’s face turned ‘the colour of his coat’.*6
Amid the noise, Campbell heard his captain call his name. He ran over expectantly. The officer calmly led him by the hand towards the enemy, where the tang of black powder and the crackle of the French muskets grew stronger. In front of the battalion the captain walked him up and down for several minutes, while shot ploughed up the ground and whistled overhead. Campbell’s fear subsided a little. ‘It was the greatest kindness that could have been shown me at such a time, and through my life I have felt grateful for it.’7 He was just 15 years old.
Campbell was, superficially at least, unlikely officer material. His parents, John and Agnes, had moved from Islay to Glasgow in the early 1790s as rising rents in the Highlands and Islands prompted mass emigration to the slums of Scotland’s central belt. While in Islay wages were below the Scottish average, in Glasgow they were as much as 50 per cent higher.8 It was a boom town full of magnates grown fat on the bottle, rope, leather goods, soap and pottery sweatshops in town; men who needed to buy their own furniture. John, a cabinetmaker, found employment with fashionable retailers Cleland, Jack, Paterson and Co., offering fine furniture in ‘three spacious saloons, each 100 by 25 feet’,9 at No. 81 Trongate, a fine example of Scots Ionic, in the mercantile heart of Glasgow (see Plate 1). He rented a house nearby and it was there on 20 October 1792 that his first son Colin was born, joined soon by a brother, John, and twin sisters, Alicia and Margery.
Victorian historians often described Colin’s father as a carpenter, perhaps to give him a pseudo-Messianic gloss, but there was a yawning gulf in skill and wages between a carpenter and a cabinetmaker. Among artisans, only stonemasons matched their wages. Cabinetmaking paid well enough for John in 1797 to enrol Colin in Mr Gibson’s class at the reputable and ancient Glasgow Grammar School. Fees of 6s per quarter, plus sixpence for coal,10 were a fraction of the cost of the grand public schools and well within the means of a cabinetmaker earning 20–30s a week. Outwardly modern, having just moved into new buildings, the school was still traditional, with a stress on the classics and grammar. Like all archaic schools, Glasgow Grammar cultivated its eccentricities, the feudal Candlemas Offering principal among them. Each February, on Candlemas Day, every boy presented a gift to his teacher in front of the rest of the school. ‘The most usual present was a quarter’s wages, or seven shillings and sixpence, commonly paid in three half crowns,’ recalled one alumnus, ‘but many of the scholars gave only five shillings, and some of them merely two shillings and sixpence; indeed there were some boys whose parents were unable to give their sons even the last mentioned pittance to present, to the sad humiliation of the poor little fellows.’11 Some humbled their teachers by giving their gift in farthings, dropped one by one into their outstretched hands. Hugh Houston, the son of a slave trader, produced a single golden guinea. The pupil displaying the greatest largesse was declared King or Victor.12 It implanted in Colin a keen desire to free himself from material subservience.
The site of Glasgow Grammar School from 1788 to 1821, at 294 George Street. (Courtesy of the High School of Glasgow)
Before the age of 10, Colin, ‘a very quiet pensive boy’,13 suffered the double blow of the deaths of his mother and his sister Margery, leaving him with a lifelong need to prepare for the worst together with a powerful feeling of responsibility towards his surviving sister, Alicia. Now with no wife, three children to feed and a full-time job, John placed his eldest son in the care of his brother-in-law, Major John Campbell.* With his uncle’s patronage, the boy’s horizons broadened considerably. This side of Colin’s family was really rather grand, but his mother Agnes had been the product of an affair. Agnes’s mother, Alice Campbell, had married Henry Campbell, Laird of Knockamellie, with whom she had two children, Duncan and Hester. Alice then left all three of them, and without waiting for divorce, eloped and married Colin Campbell of Ardnave, with whom she had a further four children, including Agnes and Major John Campbell.** Agnes’s decision to marry a cabinetmaker may have distanced her from her gentry forebears even more than the bigamous marriage of her parents. At the same time, on Agnes’s side of the family there seemed to be feelings of guilt or, at the very least, responsibility towards Colin, hence the patronage of Major Campbell. Moreover, Agnes’s family had a proud history to maintain. The blood of the earls of Argyll flowed in her veins and her roots stretched back to royalty. Colin could trace his ancestry back through sixteen generations to Robert the Bruce.***
In 1806, Major Campbell plucked Colin from Glasgow and placed him in the progressive, reformist Royal Academy in Gosport, the ‘highly regarded respectable academy in Cold Harbour, under the direction of William Burney … where young gentlemen are educated for the navy, and army, public offices and the university’.14 It was a brutal decision. Colin found his old family ties all but severed. Meanwhile, the advantages of a modern education were by no means clear. As the United Services Journal put it, ‘the sympathies of the aristocracy were in favour of the unlettered … to be ill-educated was highbred; knowledge was pedantic and vulgar’.15 The British army was unconvinced by specialist technical training. The only schooling required of an officer was basic literacy, and Colin had already mastered that in Glasgow.
Founded in 1791, the Royal Academy was a product of the Age of Reason. The curriculum included natural philosophy and practical mathematics, and it even boasted its own observatory. It was here that Campbell’s preference for professionally trained officers over the army’s traditional gifted amateurs had its genesis.16 Perhaps just as important as the subjects studied, were the boys studying there: a select group of around eighty pupils, providing an entry into the old boy network. Fee payers included a high proportion of colonels, majors, and captains from both services, not to mention the Bishop of Clogher, at least one MP and Admiral Lord Nelson, no less.**** Over the next hundred years Prince Alfred (the future Duke of Edinburgh), George V, Prince Henry of Prussia, Admiral Earl Beatty and General Sir Sam Browne would all study there.
Campbell had been in Gosport only two years when on 26 May 1808, just five months before his sixteenth birthday, he was commissioned into the 9th Foot. Officers could join the Royal Navy at 11 and as recently as 1806 Campbell’s regiment had recruited a drummer boy aged just 7,***** but for army officers a new official minimum age of 16 had just been introduced by the commander-in-chief, the Duke of York. However, in an army that failed to perform the most basic checks, the minimum age rule was easily sidestepped. Dr James Barry was commissioned in 1813 as a hospital assistant aged just 13, rose all the way to Inspector General of the Army, and it was only on his death in 1865 that it was discovered that he was really a woman.17
In any case, Horse Guards could not afford to apply the rules too stringently. As the army expanded to meet the threat from Napoleon, so there was an expanding demand for officers. This meant diluting the old, aristocratic officer class with outsiders from a more ambiguous social milieu, the majority drawn from the gentry, the burgeoning middle classes and, despite the misgivings of the high command, one in twenty from the
ranks. Campbell’s commission was the result of this accidental, embryonic meritocracy.
Horse Guards set the cost of an ensigncy at £400, but with the advent of war, promotion by purchase fell out of favour. Why pay for a promotion, when an officer might receive it for free if his colonel were shot tomorrow? And so as vacancies proliferated, the number of officers willing to pay for them shrank, allowing Campbell, like four out of five ensigns during the Peninsular War, to get his commission ‘without purchase’.18
Choice of regiment was everything. The most socially exclusive regiments monopolised staff posts and provided the lion’s share of the generals. Though not the smartest corps, the 9th Foot was by no means infra dig. Commanding were Lieutenant-Colonel Cameron, an Old Etonian, and Lieutenant-Colonel Stewart, the son of Lord Blantyre. Viscount Ebrington and the Hon. William Curzon (second son of Lord Scarsdale) had both served in the 9th, and Colonel of the Regiment was the army’s quartermaster-general, the influential Lieutenant-General Robert Brownrigg. At the same time, the 9th, ‘that serviceable regiment that had so many times distinguished themselves in their king and country’s cause’,19 was a lot easier on the pocket than the Guards or the cavalry, where an officer was expected to maintain a certain lifestyle and a certain mess bill. In the infantry the cost of uniform and kit was around £50. In the cavalry it could be £500 or more.
In late March 1808, Captain Cornwall, the 9th Foot’s youngest captain, died, giving everyone the chance to move up a rung. Godwin, a lieutenant for five years, took Cornwall’s captaincy. Ensign Shepherd was promoted to lieutenant in Godwin’s place and so, at the bottom, a vacancy appeared. ‘I have been applied to by Captain Campbell of the 9th Regt. who is a very deserving officer, to recommend his Relation* Mr Colin Campbell for an Ensigncy in the Regt.’ Brownrigg told the commander-in-chief’s military secretary on 19 May, ‘He represents Him to be in all respects Eligible.’20 A week later Campbell was gazetted. In return for his services, he received 5s 3d per diem, which, once eroded by the new income tax and sundry deductions, left him with around 4s.21 The cost of three meals a day in the officers’ mess alone was 4s 3d.22 For an ‘honourable youth who will not spend a farthing beyond that which is necessary to maintain him in a respectable appearance’, as Campbell described himself, ‘still the pay of an ensign is not sufficient’.23 At 15 he was earning as much as his father but already living beyond his means. On the plus side, in wartime an ensign could expect to rise fast with the minimum of expense; the bloodier the campaign, the swifter the promotion.
By 1807 Napoleon’s tyranny of Europe stretched from the Pyrenees to the Baltic. Portugal, one of Britain’s few remaining allies, remained independent, so, in October 1807, Bonaparte had despatched his young general Jean-Andoche Junot with 25,000 men to subdue her. Junot marched unhindered through Spain and took Lisbon, unopposed, on 30 November. To consolidate his hold on the peninsula, next spring Napoleon foisted his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne. It proved a step too far. While Junot was still in Lisbon, behind him Spain rose up in rebellion. Here was the perfect moment for a British foray to defeat the French in Portugal, hemmed in by a mutinous Spain. As Richard Sheridan told the House of Commons, ‘I am convinced … there never existed so happy an opportunity for Great Britain to strike a bold stroke for the rescue of the world.’24
The British government massed battalions on the south coast, among them the 2/9th, and mobilised troops in Ireland, including the first battalion of the 9th. Lieutenant-General Sir John Moore’s army, returning from Sweden, was also earmarked for Portugal. Appointed to command the invasion force was the young Sir Arthur Wellesley. A slight 5ft 10in tall, but broad at the shoulders, he was ‘the greyhound rather than the mastiff breed’.25 Cool, brusque and impatient, it was easy to think there was no feeling in that poor dead heart but occasionally the mask slipped; a tribute from Castlereagh brought tears to his eyes.26 Though Wellesley’s star was very much in the ascendant after an adroit campaign in India, the British press was agnostic. As The Examiner put it, Wellesley had so far only beaten ‘oppressed Indians, whose defeat does little honour to the skill of a general’.27
On 14 July, seven weeks after his commission, Campbell, kicking his heels on the Isle of Wight, received instructions to proceed instantly to join his regiment, under orders for embarkation. He set off post-haste, reaching the 9th Foot’s barracks in Canterbury by the 17th. Usual practice was for a new ensign to watch the men drill and practise for four hours a day, every day for six months.28 Campbell had just three days to familiarise himself with the officers, the men, their equipment and their expectations of an ensign, before he was thrust into a troopship bound for Portugal. Fortunately the 9th had a trio of veteran ensigns to guide him – Thompson, Newenham and Sutton – officers content to watch others promoted over them.**
Foul weather and contrary winds slowed their progress. A journey that could take as little as eight days took a month. By 17 August Campbell’s ship was lying off the Berling Rocks. Two days later he disembarked at the mouth of the Maceira. Commissary Schaumann described the dramatic landing:
With beating hearts we approached the first line of surf, and were lifted high in the air. We clung frantically to our seats, and all of us had to crouch quite low. There were twenty to thirty British sailors on the shore, all quite naked, who, the moment the foremost breakers withdrew, dashed like lightning into the surf, and after many vain efforts, during which they were often caught up and thrown back by the waves, at last succeeded in casting a long rope to us, which we were able to seize. Then with a loud hurrah, they ran at top speed through the advancing breakers up the beach, dragging us with them, until the boat stuck fast, and there was only a little spray from the surf to wet us. Finally, seizing a favourable opportunity, when a retreating wave had withdrawn sufficiently far, each of them took a soldier on his back, and carried him thus on to the dry shore.29
The French were nowhere to be seen. Campbell climbed the steep path in the tall cliff, past the old abandoned fort, to the broad heath beyond. That night he slept under the stars for the first time in his life.30 ‘The firmament spread its boundless expanse over our heads, without one cloud to obscure its twinkling brilliancy,’ recalled a physician in the same brigade, ‘while the remote horizon gleamed with the fires of the British camp, exciting many singular and thrilling emotions.’31
The expectation of a few days’ peace while supplies were landed was dispelled by news that Wellesley was only a couple of miles away, pressed by the French, and relying on these fresh troops to drive back the enemy. Junot was anxious to finish with Wellesley before he was reinforced, and thus throttle the British invasion before it made any headway. Campbell’s battalion was to head immediately to Vimeiro, where Wellesley had deployed the rest of his army. Leading them was Lieutenant-Colonel John Cameron, a product of privilege and the living vindication of the ancien régime in the army. His record was unimpeachable and his mixture of stern discipline and sympathy with the rank and file became Campbell’s blueprint for command. That he was a Scotsman must have helped. The men called him ‘the Devil’. ‘That, sir, was a compliment of which any man might be proud,’ wrote Campbell, ‘and which I should prefer to the most elaborate epitaph on my tomb.’32
Wellesley, scholar of battlefield topography, had placed the bulk of his men behind a ridge which led inland eastwards from the sea before curving north-east. This ridge was bisected by the River Maceira. On its banks nestled the village of Vimeiro, now deserted. A little to the south was an isolated hill where Wellesley had positioned his baggage train. Scarcely more than a gentle rise, 160ft above sea level at its crown with a depression in the middle, and topped with two windmills,33 it was to be the crux of the battle. Wellesley predicted that Junot would head for the hill and then advance down the valley. If correct, this would leave Campbell in the middle of the French attack.
The 633 men of 2/9th were in position on the rise by 6 a.m.34 Nearby, Campbell could see six British guns at the ready whil
e down the slope the undergrowth swarmed with riflemen waiting for the French to get close enough for them to chance a shot. When, at around 9 a.m., Campbell saw the dust cloud indicating the enemy, it looked like Junot was acting as Wellesley had predicted. French tirailleurs (skirmishers) were drawing near. Behind marched Junot’s infantry columns, ready to open fire, before breaking into a roaring charge. With convenient hubris, Junot was confident he could dislodge Wellesley’s battalions with a minimum of effort. The British riflemen had begun a deliberate and unhurried retreat up the hill, tempting the two French columns under Generals Charlot and Thomières to follow, towards the waiting 52nd and 97th Foot. The 2/9th remained behind the right flank of the 97th, close enough for Campbell to hear the musket balls whistling past. As their enemy approached, the British artillery on top of the hill opened fire. Each gun had been double-shotted with a cannonball and canister on top. ‘At every discharge a complete lane was cut through the column from front to rear by the round shot,’ recalled one officer, ‘whilst the canister was committing dreadful carnage on the foremost ranks.’35 Still the French marched on. The first force to engage Charlot’s column was the 97th, who had been hiding in a dip in the ground. They waited until the French were within 150 yards, and then, as one, rose and fired. A couple of volleys sent the enemy into retreat. Joined by the 52nd, the 97th charged down the hill, forcing the French back half a mile into a wood, at which point their brigade commander, General Anstruther, worried that they had overplayed their hand, despatched an aide-de-camp to stop them.36
Victoria’s Scottish Lion Page 3
