Victoria’s Scottish Lion

by Greenwood, Adrian; Haythornthwaite, Philip;

  Friendship with Keate might sit ill with Campbell’s liberal sensibilities, but they were both children of Georgian England, a country of Hogarth, box pews and aquatint. Keate’s form of corporal punishment had been just as popular when Campbell was at school. The belief that it might brutalise was still eccentric and Campbell was certainly not averse to having soldiers flogged, if only sparingly. So far Campbell had served with commanders who were products of the old, Keatish public schools, officers like Sir Thomas Graham and Sir John Cameron who survived the Eton of the 1700s. Twenty years as a soldier had taught Campbell to deal with, and acquiesce in, a military culture forged in those ancient schools, but by the 1820s there was a growing urge, whipped up by the expanding middle class, to revolutionise education and create a new race of Britons in the process. Foremost among the forgers of this new breed was Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby from 1828, a man dedicated to recasting public schools in contradistinction to Keate. Central to his vision was religion: a modern, robust, beefy forearmed Christianity. As ideal manly virtues Arnold insisted, ‘What we must look for is first religious and moral principle; secondly gentlemanly conduct; thirdly, intellectual ability.’61 To Arnold, mere intellect, without a moral compass was ‘more revolting than the most helpless imbecility, seeming to me almost like the spirit of Mephistopheles’.62 It would be a generation before Campbell ran into the products of Arnold’s philosophy in journalism, politics and the army, but when he did it would be a profound culture shock.

  From the age of 15 Campbell had been exposed to an officers’ mess where religion was often mocked. ‘I have heard some of these espirits fort say the Bible was a parcel of stupid stuff, unintelligible to their understandings’, wrote Ensign Le Mesurier of his colleagues in the 9th Foot. ‘Plaguing young officers which do not exactly agree with them on these points is their greatest delight.’63 In that atmosphere Campbell had developed a more insouciant faith than the more interventionist variety flourishing in middle-class Britain. He was God-fearing, but no evangelical. Campbell’s Scots Presbyterian faith was personal and unobtrusive, rather than brawny and impassioned.64

  At the same time, middle-class Britain was becoming dissatisfied with the morals and habits of the officers who had defeated Napoleon. The idea that poverty was providential was waning and the idea that to be good, one needed to do good deeds was gaining ground. The evangelical movement had been strong when Campbell had first joined the army, though never within the military, but as the century progressed and a new breed of ex-public schoolboys gained commissions, the overlap between Church and military increased. Campbell had grown up in an army commanded by soldiers, not soldiers of Christ,** but these saints militant manqués, officers sure of their own convictions in religious, moral, cultural and military terms, were gaining an ever-tighter grasp, ready to remould the world to suit their ideal of British Christian civilisation. Campbell’s army, the army of 1808, in essence a mercenary army, had been composed of men who fought because they were told to do so and paid to do so, but in the eyes of the young men growing up in Arnold’s shadow it was now a crusading force. For them, British victories in the first half of the nineteenth century proved the rightness of the British cause and strengthened Britain’s claim to be the moral guardian of the world. It was Campbell’s fate to find himself beset by crusaders who owed their character to the reformed classrooms of the 1820s and 1830s.

  For now, those battles were far in the future. A very different conflict was about to engage Campbell’s attention. Having left Windsor in the spring of 1828, first for Portsmouth and then to Bath, in the autumn of 1828 the Fusiliers were ordered to Ireland, a colony permanently on the threshold of revolt. Britain and Ireland had been yoked together in 1800 under the Act of Union to create the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The addition of several million Irish Roman Catholics to the body politic disclosed the entrenched discrimination against Catholics inherent in the British constitution. The Test Acts passed by Charles II had denied Catholics and Non-Conformists rights enjoyed by Protestant subjects (specifically those to hold public office or sit in parliament), and by the late 1820s there was mounting pressure to reform the system with full Catholic emancipation.

  That same year, the most conservative of Tory peers, the Duke of Wellington, became prime minister. With him came a new cabinet and at that time convention demanded that each new minister resign his seat and seek re-election. They almost always returned with the laurels. When Wellington’s new president of the Board of Trade, the Anglo-Irish MP William Vesey-Fitzgerald. stood down to renew his mandate, the leader of the Catholic emancipation cause, Daniel O’Connell, saw his chance and contested the seat. The voters plumped for O’Connell, but as a Catholic he was barred from appearing in the Commons,* bringing to the fore the iniquities under which Catholics laboured, and energising the emancipation lobby. For Wellington there seemed a very real threat that unless Catholic emancipation was galloped through Westminster, the banshee of Fenianism would slip her bonds, but to drive such a contentious policy through parliament required delicacy, diplomacy and discretion, none of which were the duke’s strong suits.

  Over the summer the Marquess of Anglesey, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, grew increasingly apprehensive as Catholic emancipation inched its way sluggishly towards the statute book. In September he appealed to Wellington for reinforcements. Leahy’s Fusiliers had proved they could subdue the defiant vassals of King George, and so they were ordered to the garrison town of Fermoy. Because its prosperity relied on the military, Fermoy was one of the most soldier-friendly towns in Ireland, but beyond its outskirts British soldiers were the foe. As one contemporary wrote, ‘In Ireland, the army is considered by “the people” as their determined and implacable enemy.’65 Nor was there was any advantage to be gained in being a Scottish rather than an English officer. The preponderance of Scots in Ulster made them just as culpable colonists as the English.

  Though Ireland seemed on a hair-trigger, as late autumn turned to winter the predicted rebellion failed to materialise and Ireland’s refractory spirit slowly ebbed. By the spring of 1829 George IV had been persuaded of the need for reform and the Catholic Relief Act passed through Westminster that March. O’Connell, his appetite whetted by victory, now began a campaign to repeal the Act of Union and introduce home rule for Ireland. Over the early summer of 1829 the murmurs of the Irish Nationalists grew in volume and confidence, and in June Campbell’s regiment was moved again, this time to Mullingar.

  But while O’Connell’s fight continued at Westminster, in Ireland it did not yet spill over into the violence so long feared. In May 1830 the 21st marched to new headquarters at Kilkenny. Its castle made it a natural garrison town with barracks for half the regiment.66 From here Campbell parcelled out detachments to garrison Carlow, Athy, Maryborough and Wexford. With troops dispersed over such a broad and populous region, and with only a few pot-holed tracks linking them, the Fusiliers’ presence was widespread but thin. As in the West Indies, control was a matter of appearance not concrete force.

  Kilkenny was restless. Possessed of what Samuel Lewis called a ‘venerable magnificence’, its crumbling grandeur obscured the fact that the greater part of its 25,000 inhabitants were dirt poor. ‘The suburbs I found more wretched than any I had yet seen in any town’, recorded one visitor. ‘Pigs were by no means a universal possession, and the chief wealth of the poor seemed to be dung-heaps before their door.’67 Beyond the hovels of the urban underclass, the countryside was equally impoverished. Ireland’s population explosion was strangling the nation’s natural resources. Over the generations farms had been repeatedly sub-divided, to the point where whole families were dependent on less than an acre. The only crop which could provide enough food on such a small plot was the potato. Campbell arrived in Kilkenny in early summer, a lean time as the harvest from the previous year was exhausted. He found the self-same problems as in Demerara: absentee landlords, pressures on agriculture, and above all the powerlessness of those
who worked the fields. The outcome was remarkably similar.

  What tipped Kilkenny over the edge in 1830 was the tithe system, a tax levied on agricultural land to maintain the Church. It had been collected in England for centuries. The problem in Ireland was that those paying the tithes were predominantly Roman Catholics while the tax financed the Protestant Church of Ireland. Daniel O’Connell identified eight parishes with, on average, more than 2,000 Catholics but not a single Protestant parishioner, where a tithe was nevertheless collected to support the local Protestant rector.68

  That summer saw food riots break out in Limerick and Leitrim. For a while Kilkenny remained quiet, until Graiguenamanagh, on the border of County Kilkenny and County Carlow, provided the spark. This small town of 4,779 Catholics had a Protestant rector, Dr Alcock, and a curate, Mr MacDonald, to minister to the sixty-three Protestant worshippers. As a member of the New Reformation Society (a Protestant evangelical organisation which sought to convert Catholics), a local magistrate and a tithe collector, MacDonald was unpopular with the locals on at least three counts. It was accepted practice that, although legally entitled to do so, Protestant rectors did not levy a tithe on the local Catholic priest. MacDonald, however, demanded his dues without exception. When the Catholic pastor, Father Doyle, refused to pay, MacDonald seized his horse. This set the community against the young curate and soon everyone was refusing to pay the tithe. With talk of reform and repeal of the union in the air, there seemed little point in paying a tax that might be abolished. As news of their protest spread, farmers demanded their tithes be reviewed or reduced, with dissent strongest in Wexford, Carlow, Kilkenny and Queen’s County.

  Campbell’s strategy was precautionary and discreet. On 30 December, when a crowd of tithe protesters gathered at nearby Bennettsbridge, rather than send troops to disperse them, he instead reinforced the castle and Tholsel (town hall) in Kilkenny, in case things turned nasty. Fortunately the meeting proceeded peacefully. On New Year’s Day, Campbell led two companies of Fusiliers, along with 270 policemen, to Castlecomer, in case tithe protesters rallying at Dysart Bridge became violent. Eight thousand people were demanding the right to march through town, but the magistrates were sceptical. Campbell counselled them to allow the march, so the demonstrators could let off steam. Once the protesters agreed to disperse afterwards, the magistrates permitted the march, and the protest passed off without any violence.69

  Through the early spring of 1831 the tithe warriors become bolder and more bellicose. Even O’Connell became concerned that the impasse would lead to war, and urged the people of Kilkenny to stop their political meetings. He was ignored. As matters looked to be building to a violent finale, Sir John Harvey, Inspector-General of Police for Leinster, decided to get tough. That March he sent 350 police into Graiguenamanagh to seize cattle in lieu of the taxes owing. A detachment of the 21st Fusiliers marched to Gauzan, about 7 miles away; far enough not to inflame matters, but near enough to assist if needed.70 Until Harvey’s intervention the protesters had never overstepped the boundary between disobedience and revolt but on 21 March 1831 a process server near Bennettsbridge, County Kilkenny, was murdered. Harvey sensed an excuse to spread his net wide. Colonel Leahy sent a company of the 21st to help arrest nearly thirty suspects,71 but it did not settle the matter.

  Harvey’s attempts to impound livestock were impeded at every turn. An ancient law meant that the cattle could only be seized when outside, so whenever the police appeared, lookouts with hunting horns sounded the alarm and the cattle were herded into barns. Auctioneers selling the few animals confiscated found no one prepared to buy them and their auctions boycotted. Because the cattle were often branded ‘tithe’ they were easily blacklisted. One herd seized in Graiguenamanagh not only failed to sell, no one would supply fodder for it either. The cows were shipped to Liverpool but even here no buyers or suppliers of forage could be found and eventually the animals starved to death.72 After two months of seizures Harvey had only collected a third of the amount due. In May he gave up.73

  The fall in the number of soldiers in Ireland from 20,408 in 1830 to just 16,701 in 1831 was placing a greater burden on the constabulary,74 but the police were proving heavy-handed. Seven people were killed at a fair at Castlepollard when police opened fire, even though they were not tithe protestors.75 In desperation Anglesey reinstated the yeomanry. In abeyance for ten years, they had proved a liability in the past with their outdated arms and reputation for thuggishness. Their presence was as likely to inflame revolt as keep it in check and, sure enough, on 18 June at Newtownbarry, after an auction of seized cattle ended without bids and the crowd became restless, fourteen people were killed by the yeomanry and police.76

  The Irish press bellowed invective. ‘Never was there a more wanton, causeless, unprovoked massacre’, declared the anti-tithe Freeman’s Journal. Faced with censure from every paper, the yeomanry were keen to find a senior officer from the regular army to justify their actions. ‘Major Campbell of the Fusileers, was called up by the yeomanry to prove that their conduct under the circumstances was justifiable,’ reported the Freeman’s Journal, ‘but this brave man would swear to no such monstrous purport. On the contrary he fully, unequivocally, decidedly condemned them. He said “had he been there no lives would have been lost.”’77 Events bore out his contention. On 4 July 1831 a company of the 21st was asked to help supervise an auction of sixteen cattle at Castlecomer. This time there was no yeomanry present. The event passed off without incident.

  For an officer publicly to condemn another arm of the state responsible for maintaining order was heady stuff, but after Demerara, Campbell was determined not to become the tool of repression a second time. A secret supporter of O’Connell, his service during the Tithe Wars was ‘the most painful it ever fell to his lot to be called upon to perform’,78 but at least he had an ally in his lieutenant-colonel. Ireland had wrought a transformation in Leahy. The brutality had been replaced with admirable restraint. In Ireland, Leahy never intervened to stop Campbell’s even-handedness. Why the man who shot first and asked questions later in the tropics so swiftly turned into an umpire between state and citizen in Kilkenny, is a puzzle. As his name suggests, Leahy was an Irishman but being of Irish stock did not in itself guarantee a bias towards the island’s agrarian poor. Perhaps it was simply a nuanced appreciation of the politics behind the Tithe War. Leahy and Campbell must have known that, although required by law to gather the tithes, Anglesey inclined towards the demonstrators. As it transpired, Campbell’s public detachment from the yeomanry encouraged a new respect for the army among the Irish, as pawns of a corrupt church. ‘How often have our gallant soldiery been debased into the murderers of their fellow men, whenever they dare to resist paying tithe to a set of infamous wolves in sheep’s clothing, who are the flayers instead of the pastors of the poor[?]’,79 complained the anti-tithe Comet.

  While Ireland edged closer to civil war, Britain too was becoming restive. The Tithe War encouraged those demanding reform in London. The first target of radicals in Britain was the creaking electoral system. They argued that MPs could not claim to speak for the people when the distribution of seats across the country bore so little relation to the population. Populous northern industrial towns were completely unrepresented. Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield had not one MP between them, yet there were tiny villages returning two MPs. Muddying the waters further were the numerous ‘pocket boroughs’ (by one estimate, 276 of the Commons’ 658 seats) in the pocket of landed families who by owning the land controlled the voters.* The radicals wanted one great overhaul to restore parliament’s credibility.

  Though Wellington had demonstrated a taste for expediency with regard to Catholic emancipation, he was adamantly opposed to any grand voting reforms, warning that ‘from the period of the adoption of that measure will date the downfall of the Constitution’.80 But in November 1830 the duke was forced to resign in favour of the reforming Whig Lord Grey, who set about pushing through an electoral
reform bill. Grey’s attempt failed and resultant public frustration focused on the bill’s implacable opponent, Wellington. While his wife was dying, an irate mob surrounded Wellington’s London home, Apsley House, and smashed the windows. They were eventually dispersed by a servant with a blunderbuss.

  In early summer 1831 Grey went to the country and the Whigs were returned to power with a healthy majority. The new government pressed ahead with a second reform bill, which passed through the Commons that autumn. The Lords however were having none of it, and voted it down on 8 October. Outcry at the intransigence of the upper chamber turned violent. Bristol was beset by riots for three days and in Nottingham protesters burnt the castle, a silk mill and Colwick Hall, home of a prominent local Tory. The Duke of Wellington once again found his windows smashed. A stone narrowly missed his head while he was at his desk.

  With the situation growing more grave by the day, the last option left was to recall troops from Ireland. There was as yet no official police force in England outside London and it fell to the magistrates, army and militia to keep the peace. So, while Ireland still twitched with unrest, in the autumn of 1831 Leahy’s Fusiliers received orders to return to England. The 21st sailed for Liverpool in October.81 Campbell was leaving Ireland just as the Tithe War turned ugly. Two months later sixteen policemen and their chief constable were killed by a mob in Carriskshock, County Kilkenny.82

  That December yet another reform bill was placed before parliament. Again it passed through the Commons only to be voted down by the Lords, but when it was presented to the upper chamber a second time, their lordships realised that to reject it once more risked civil war. Instead they opted for malign lethargy, talking and amending the bill to death. Prime Minister Lord Grey still had one trump card. It was within his power to ask the king to create sufficient sympathetic lords to vote through the reforms. Such a radical step offended William IV’s notions of peerage, and so Grey resigned and the Duke of Wellington, the implacable opponent of reform, was called upon to form a government in May 1832. In anticipation of the public reaction, Apsley House had this time been fitted with shutters to protect the windows. Wellington found it impossible to garner enough support for a government under his leadership and so Grey was asked back as prime minister. The king agreed reluctantly to a huge enlargement of the peerage if the current Lords remained obstinate, but by now both sovereign and peers realised further opposition might endanger their very existence and so the upper chamber passed the bill, which became law in June 1832. The bourgeoisie had breached the outer defences.