30 Gomm, 301.
31 Dent, 33; Oman, VI, 322; Gomm, 299.
32 RNRM/45.4.
33 Loraine Petre, I, 245.
34 Stanhope, 112; Hayward, 65; Bridgeman, 113.
35 Glover, The Peninsular War, 28.
36 Fitzclarence, 107.
37 Gomm, 306.
38 Sherer, 236.
39 RNRM/45.4.
40 Hale, 102; Oman, V, 374.
41 Shadwell, I, 13.
42 Hale, 102.
43 Shadwell, I, 14.
44 Dickson, 912.
45 RNRM/45.4.
46 Hale, 103.
47 Hale, 104.
48 Shadwell, I, 15.
49 RNRM/45.4.
50 Hale, 105; Loraine Petre, I, 249.
51 Hale, 105.
52 Shadwell, I, 16.
53 Hale, 106.
54 Shadwell, I, 16; Stanhope, 116.
55 Gomm, 305.
56 Stanhope, 117.
57 Loraine Petre, I, 250.
58 Hale, 107.
59 Oman, VI, 441.
60 Stanhope, 117.
61 Harries-Jenkins, 8.
62 Hennell, 103.
63 Bell, G., 89.
64 WIG/EHC25/M793/176.
65 RNRM/45.4.
66 Shadwell, I, 120.
67 Dent, 37; WIG/EHC25/M793/176.
68 Loraine Petre, I, 253; Hale, 114.
69 Gomm, 317.
70 Jones, J., II, 16–17.
71 Jones, J., II, 21; Shadwell, I, 20.
72 Loraine Petre, I, 254; RNRM/45.9.1.
73 RNRM/45.1.1; 45.1.2.
74 RNRM/45.1.1; WIG/EHC25/M793/182.
75 RNRM/45.1.1.
76 RNRM/45.1.1.
77 Shadwell, I, 22–3.
78 Wrottesley, I, 267; Jones, J., II, 32.
79 Shadwell, I, 25.
80 Dent, 39; Shadwell, I, 23; Wrottesley, I, 269.
81 Shadwell, I, 25.
82 Stanhope, 122; Henegan, II, 44; RNRM/45.9.1.
83 RNRM/45.9.1.
84 RNRM/45.9.1.
85 Jones, H., 193.
86 Gomm, 322.
87 Dent, 39.
88 Loraine Petre, I, 258.
89 WIG/EHC25/M793/184.
90 Cooke, II, 14.
91 Gleig, 54.
92 Brett-James, General Graham, 281.
93 Gomm, 318–19.
94 Jones, J., II, 91.
95 Beatson, 59.
96 Gleig, 82.
97 Beatson, 67.
98 RNRM/45.9.
99 Malmesbury, II, 386.
100 Beatson, 78.
101 RNRM/45.9.
102 Ryan, 81.
103 Frazer, 292; Beatson, 81.
3
Policeman
* * *
‘Everyone knows that the commissioned officers of His Majesty’s army stand a far better chance with the fair sex than any other class of His Majesty’s subjects … but nowhere are they so killing as in the colonies; there they are the undisputed masters of white and black, fair and foul’
Henry Coleridge
* * *
Given the scale of the offensive, British losses at the passage of the Bidassoa were trifling: just 537 out of 24,000 troops engaged. They fell heavily on the ‘Fighting 9th’. The battalion suffered eighty-two casualties including Campbell, who had taken a musket ball in the thigh, just above the right knee.1 He was invalided back to Spain to sit out the allied invasion of France and wait for the captaincy he had been expecting since 25 July. It would be forty-one years before he fought in Europe again.
Throughout the Peninsular War, the convention that officers leading a forlorn hope received promotion was tempered by Wellington’s caprices. The duke’s opinion on the matter was clear. ‘Nothing is more difficult than to promote an officer, excepting one of very long standing, to a troop of company without purchase’, he wrote. ‘Since I have commanded this army I have not been able to promote more than two or three in this way.’2 Many went unrewarded. Lieutenant Mackie received nothing for leading the second forlorn hope at Ciudad Rodrigo.* For others, Wellington’s bounty was a poisoned chalice. The two lieutenants who led the assaults on Burgos were both offered vacancies in foetid colonial regiments.
In a letter of 11 September 1813, Wellington’s military secretary, Lord Fitzroy Somerset, confirmed that Campbell was one of three subalterns ‘mentioned to Lord Wellington as having particularly distinguished themselves’3 at San Sebastian, but stopped short of overtly recommending promotion. After Campbell’s conduct at the Bidassoa, the commander-in-chief could not ignore him a second time. On 9 November 1813, he got his captaincy without purchase.
The vacancy was in the 60th Foot, the Royal Americans, a regiment with an abundance of battalions unique in the British army. Most had two or three. Campbell joined the newly raised 7/60th. An 8th battalion was created that same year, and a 9th and 10th planned. The Royal Americans were a specialised corps of skirmishers raised for combat in the forests of North America. At Vimeiro it had been the 5/60th, with their distinctive deep green uniforms and Baker rifles, that Campbell had seen engage the French tirailleurs down the slope in front of him. Campbell’s talent for light infantry tactics made him an ideal officer for the 60th. However, he was still not well enough to serve with them and so, granted a leave of absence, returned to Britain in December 1813. The army was sympathetic, awarding him two years’ pay plus a temporary pension of £100/year, £30–£40 of which he sent annually to his father in Scotland.4 But rather than return to Glasgow and his family, Campbell’s first instinct was to head for London. Aside from the few weeks between Corunna and Walcheren, and a brief period of recuperation after his return from the Scheldt, he had been abroad for five and a half years. He arrived with nowhere to live, so his uncle offered him a place to stay.
Campbell had a new objective: to transfer out of the 60th as quickly as possible. Raised from prisoners of war incarcerated in the Channel Islands, the 7/60th was a ‘condemned corps’, banned from service in Britain. The government, haunted by fears of infiltration by alien powers, prohibited foreign soldiers serving in British corps from setting foot on the British mainland. Unless Campbell could extricate himself from the 7/60th he would be confined to service abroad, and with the probability of peace in Europe growing by the day, that meant service in the colonies, the graveyard of the British soldier. This tainted status made the 60th a dustbin for bad officers. As one soldier wrote, ‘Young men of money or interest, in getting a commission in the regiment or obtaining promotion in it, were always certain that they could effect an exchange into some other more select corps which wished to get quietly rid of a black sheep.’5 Anyone with funds and contacts left the 60th post haste.
‘One Campaign in St James’s is more efficacious in the attainment of promotion than half-a-dozen Campaigns in active service’, as one officer drily observed.6 Campbell’s uncle had implanted a firm belief in the primacy of influence over ability. In the Peninsula Campbell had cultivated his contacts assiduously and now, back home, he exploited them shamelessly. He had already extracted a reference from Major-General Hay recommending him as ‘a most gallant and meritorious young officer’.
A staff appointment was the fast track for the ambitious officer. With this in mind, Campbell’s uncle wrote to Sir Thomas Graham, who had mentioned Colin in despatches twice already, to see if there were any vacancies on the general’s staff for his new campaign in Holland. Graham replied that all the posts had been allotted before he had been appointed commander, but assured the colonel ominously that ‘I have no doubt of being able to provide for him soon.’ In the meantime, Graham recommended that Captain Campbell loiter at Horse Guards to be on hand as and when a vacancy arose.
The weeks dragged by, but nothing was forthcoming. In March, Graham suggested Campbell try the Royal Scots. ‘His Royal Highness the Duke of Kent** is so desirous of bringing officers of distinguished merit into the Royal Scots’, explained Graham, ‘that I should hope your exchange
would meet with his approbation.’ As it turned out, the duke was not that keen after all. Graham assured Campbell that ‘no one can deserve better to be rewarded for his exertions’,7 and enclosed a testimonial repeating the sentiment, but his entreaties came to nought. Wellington had always ‘preferred ability with a title to ability without’,8 and by now his prejudices were honoured at Horse Guards as the pleasures of a god.
While Campbell was pressing his case in London, France had fallen. In April Napoleon had abdicated and submitted to exile on the island of Elba. With the Bonaparte threat apparently neutralised, the British government could no longer justify maintaining an army numbering around 250,000 men and a navy over 100,000. With peace would come a huge contraction, leaving battalions of officers, desperate to avoid retirement on half-pay, snatching at any vacancy available. For Campbell, the prospects of a staff position or an exchange into a regiment closer to the movers and shakers in Horse Guards were vanishing fast. Dismayed, but conscious that a captaincy abroad was better than none at all, Campbell bowed before the storm and set off to join his battalion.
The 7/60th were in Halifax, Nova Scotia, fighting the Americans. On 18 June 1812, riled by the impressment of US sailors by the Royal Navy, and impelled by clever political manoeuvring by Napoleon, residual bitterness left over from the Revolutionary War and a desire to seize Canada, the USA had thrown herself into the Napoleonic wars on the French side. Born of expediency, it was an uneasy alliance. American democrats were the natural political bedfellows of French republicans but a compact with Napoleon’s imperial administration lacked any political rationale beyond the purely pragmatic.
Though Britain’s gaze was distracted by war in Europe, the first aggressive strike from the former colonists against the trifling garrison in Canada proved a failure. As the Americans expanded their navy, so the conflict moved its focus to the Great Lakes and Niagara. Britain, though a reluctant adversary, saw every reason, once the Americans had unsheathed their swords, to repay their warmongering in kind and expand the imperial realm. The Maine salient, the border anomaly that dug into the belly of Canada, threatened British North America by all but cutting off New Brunswick and Nova Scotia to the east from the St Lawrence River, Quebec and Montreal to the west. One of the least enthusiastic territories of the union,** Maine could be counted upon to put up only half-hearted resistance against a British invasion.
In August 1814, Lieutenant-General Sir John Coape Sherbrooke led two rifle companies of the 7/60th down the Penobscot River, beat the local militia at the Battle of Hampden and grabbed the lion’s share of Maine for King George.*** Engrossed in his Whitehall manoeuvrings, Campbell did not reach Halifax until October 1814, by which time the campaign was over. War in that hemisphere was petering out and Campbell found himself stranded in an exiled battalion, which he had tried strenuously to leave, without an enemy to fight. His wounds still troubled him, and after a tiresome voyage and with the hard Canadian winter closing in, he was relieved of duties. His health showing little sign of improving, in late July 1815 he was given leave to return home to Britain, where he successfully reapplied for his pension.9
During Campbell’s absence Europe had been transformed. Having escaped from Elba, Napoleon had returned to France as resurrected leader and mobilised a new army, only to meet defeat at the hands of Wellington and Blücher at Waterloo. Campbell had missed the defining military event of the century. As the United Service Journal wrote, ‘a man who was not fortunate enough to have been a victor at Waterloo, had for many years no claim at the Horse Guards’.10 Without war, Campbell’s chances of promotion faltered.
Granted further leave, he headed for the south of France, spending an uneventful 1816 and part of 1817 bathing in hot springs. No one could accuse a man who had dragged himself from his sick bed to head for the battlefield of being a malingerer, but even the most generous soul might raise an eyebrow over Campbell’s service with the 60th Foot. In those four years Campbell was only present alongside his company for a few months in Canada, and spent most of that period indisposed. In later life, in far more disease-ridden and fly-blown colonial outposts, Campbell managed not merely to serve, but to fight and command while shouldering the weight of his intermittent fevers. Yet in the 60th his ill health seemed an insurmountable obstacle, even though he managed to find the time and energy to visit Paris during his convalescence. Then again, who, if offered, would choose the snows of Nova Scotia over a hot bath on the French Riviera, paid for by the state?
By 1817 the clamour for economies from the Treasury, reinforced by the latent British suspicion of a large standing army, was irresistible. Income tax, introduced ‘temporarily’ by Pitt in 1799 to help pay for the war, had been repealed in 1816, reducing government revenue and making cuts inevitable. Between 1815 and 1820 expenditure on the army and ordnance fell by more than three-quarters.11 There were 21,000 regular officers on full pay at the end of the war.Now all but a fraction were surplus to requirements, triggering a scramble for those posts that would survive the great cull. With England awash with Peninsular War veterans, only the best, or rather the best placed, would be retained in the post-Napoleonic army. There was no demand for a feverish, thrice-wounded captain, when healthier, wealthier and better-connected officers were in abundance.12
The decision to reduce (or disband) the 7/60th had long been expected. The 8/60th had already been axed. It was the most junior officers from each rank who were discarded. Campbell, midway down the regiment’s list of captains, survived the cut and transferred to the 5th Battalion. The 5th, the most celebrated battalion of the Royal Americans, would surely not fall victim to further retrenchment? Campbell summoned up the strength to join the 5/60th, conveniently stationed at Gibraltar, but it too was soon recalled for reduction, meeting its end on the Isle of Wight in July 1818. Once again Campbell’s injuries prevented him from leaving the Mediterranean.
This time he searched in vain for a vacancy in the rump of the 60th. Other men might have accepted their fate and turned to another career, but Campbell was not about to hang up his sword after sacrificing so much to gain his captaincy. He had no training or experience in any field other than the military. The army remained the only employer offering respectability and the promise of enough spoils to make him not just well off, but seriously wealthy, and financial security had always been one of Campbell’s strongest motivations. His only chance was to exchange, but because the 5th had been disbanded, he needed an officer prepared to retire on half-pay. There was no impediment to officers on full pay swapping regiments, as long as their commanding officers agreed, but an officer exchanging to half-pay had no say in the appointment of his successor. That was up to the commander-in-chief, the Duke of York.
Campbell had been lobbying the commander-in-chief hard, enlisting the help of his old colonel (now Sir) John Cameron and Sir John Macdonald, the Deputy Adjutant-General, to find a vacancy, any vacancy, to avoid forced retirement. As the 60th dissolved around him, at last, on 26 November 1818, Campbell was offered an exchange with Captain James McHaffie of the 21st Royal North British Fusiliers. It came at a heavy cost.
In April 1818, the 21st Fusiliers had been ordered to Barbados. It is impossible from the perspective of the twenty-first century to appreciate how a posting in the West Indies put the fear of God into British officers. The literature of the period spoke of the islands as the ne plus ultra of contagion. ‘A sense of terror attaches to the very name of the West Indies,’ wrote one doctor, ‘many even considering it synonymous with the grave.’13 Mortality among the troops was monstrous. In the twelve months to April 1796, of the 20,000 British troops stationed in the West Indies, nearly 6,500 died from disease.14 In Jamaica officers disembarking were greeted by a mysterious man with a long wand who displayed an interest in their height and build. It was the local undertaker.15
Officers would move heaven and earth to avoid the tropics. Captain McHaffie was by no means exceptional. In one regiment commanded to sail for Mauritius, every single
officer applied to exchange before departure.16 These officers had to offer a financial incentive to those taking their place. Because such payments were unofficial, there is no record of whether Campbell was paid to join the 21st. The glut of redundant officers anxious to stay on full pay in 1818 provided an abnormally large number willing to consider a colonial posting, thus depressing the going rate for exchange, perhaps even removing it entirely.
It is a measure of Campbell’s desperation that in spite of malarial fever and old war wounds he was prepared to join a regiment that faced gradual annihilation. His medical record marked him out as an odds-on early casualty, while service in the 21st meant perhaps a decade or more abroad, further straining his family ties and placing him a long way from Horse Guards. The greater the distance, the less chance he had to press his own interests. Then again, in so far as the West Indies reduced life expectancy, it sped up promotion for the survivors. Of the ten captains in the Fusiliers, four left before the regiment departed for the Caribbean. Campbell was the second to exchange, so as soon as he reached the West Indies he was eighth on the list, and with the attrition rate in the Caribbean, he might have only a short wait before gaining his majority.
The 21st were understandably unhurried to leave, lingering in Portsmouth for nearly a year before sailing for Bridgetown, Barbados in March 1819. Campbell followed in April. Sir Thomas Graham (now ennobled as Lord Lynedoch) provided a letter of introduction to get his foot in the door of Barbadian society.17 It seemed to work: ‘Balls and dinner parties were frequent at Pilgrim [the governor’s official residence]’, recalled Viscountess Combermere, the governor’s wife, ‘and among the guests most frequently present was a certain Captain Colin Campbell.’18
In the era of Pax Britannica, the primary responsibility of Campbell’s men was to serve as a bulwark against slave unrest. ‘In a community formed like this, the public mind is ever tremblingly alive to the dangers of insurrection’, warned Lord Combermere.19 The island’s last revolt had been three years before. It was vital that the garrison was above all a visible deterrent. Pomp and ceremony helped Britain sustain a vast empire on a shoestring budget and so, once a week between 6 and 7 p.m., when the worst of the heat had passed, Campbell and the other captains paraded their companies for the benefit of the governor. Crowds numbering in the thousands gathered to watch, though perhaps that said more about the range of alternative amusements on offer in Bridgetown than the quality of the spectacle itself.
Victoria’s Scottish Lion Page 11
