Victoria’s Scottish Lion

by Greenwood, Adrian; Haythornthwaite, Philip;

  While England toyed with revolution, Campbell’s mind was focused on promotion. Exploiting the burnish to his reputation given by the Irish press, he decided to push for a lieutenant-colonelcy. It was an ambitious move only six years after his majority, and it would plunge him further into debt, but it was the last rank available for purchase. After that promotion was by seniority and merit only.

  Campbell was the senior of the Fusiliers’ two majors, and would get first refusal on Leahy’s lieutenant-colonelcy should it fall vacant, but he was not prepared to wait,** so he would have to find a vacancy elsewhere. Given the competition, purchasing the promotion was the only realistic option. Before leaving Kilkenny, Campbell had lobbied Sir John Byng, commander of HM’s forces in Ireland and a distinguished Peninsular War veteran. Byng approved of Campbell’s diplomatic treatment of the tithe protesters and agreed to put in a good word for him with the commander-in-chief. Nothing came of it so Campbell wrote again to make sure Byng had pulled strings as promised. Byng assured him that he had reported Campbell’s competence to Horse Guards several times but it looked like it was to be jobs for the boys.

  Promotion was officially in the gift of the commander-in-chief but real power lay in the hands of his military secretary, Lord Fitzroy Somerset (later Lord Raglan). Appointed in 1827, Fitzroy Somerset was to cling to his post until 1852, affording him unrivalled influence over army commissions and appointments: it would be no exaggeration to say that the British army officer corps of the mid-nineteenth century was Fitzroy Somerset’s creature. Charming and diplomatic, he was of aristocratic pedigree. The inclination towards leaving the old ruling class in the top army jobs was in his blood, an inclination strengthened by long exposure to the Duke of Wellington. So, when Campbell applied early in 1832 for a vacancy in the 65th Foot, it was unsurprising that Fitzroy Somerset replied that ‘he could not undertake to say that he would be able to select him for the lieutenant-colonelcy’.83 All of which made the letter which reached Campbell on 5 October 1832 an object of wonder. In it Fitzroy Somerset informed him that if he were to lodge the sum of £1,300* in the hands of his regimental agents, his name would be submitted for the purchase of an unattached lieutenant-colonelcy on half-pay. An unspecified relative on Campbell’s mother’s side provided the money.To have £1,300 in liquid assets ready to lend to your nephew/cousin in 1832 indicates a level of prosperity in his mother’s family which further contradicts the whole poor-boy-made-good image Campbell encouraged.84

  As with the grant of Campbell’s captaincy back in 1813, Fitzroy Somerset’s munificence had its limits. A half-pay lieutenant-colonelcy cost about the same as a full-pay one, yet carried with it a lower salary than a full-pay majority.85 It was promotion in title but brought none of the benefits of command. No longer an officer attached to a specific regiment, Campbell would in effect be in semi-retirement.** By now he had invested £2,700 in his rank, which at his new reduced income represented thirteen years’ pay. Since 1825, in an attempt to prevent the senescence of the officer corps, those on half-pay had been permitted to sell on their commissions, which at least turned his lieutenant-colonelcy into an investment. In the past buying a half-pay commission had meant giving up your capital because it could not be sold on.

  Campbell was gazetted lieutenant-colonel on 26 October 1832. After twenty-four years in the army, he was his own master. ‘By means of patience, common-sense and time, impossibility becomes possible’,86 he wrote in his commonplace book, though he should have added ‘networking’ and ‘relatives with spare cash’ to the supposed levers of fate. The promotion came just in time. The passage of the Great Reform Act in June had neutered much of the political agitation in Britain and, given the diminishing need for soldiers to keep the peace, the 21st Fusiliers were destined for the colonies again, this time as guards in Australia’s convict colony. The West Indies might have seemed a backwater, but they were positively cosmopolitan compared with Australia. For Campbell, a man fixated upon war in Europe, his chances of again fighting on the Continent would vanish. Recalling soldiers from Australia was so expensive and time-consuming it would only be contemplated in a lengthy war as a last resort. Had he not sidestepped the move to Sydney, Campbell’s career would have come to a standstill.

  The great privilege of half-pay was not being required to serve with the army. Campbell was free to do pretty much as he pleased and so in late 1832 he headed for the Low Countries; at first glance an odd choice for a man whose last trip there had ended in a malarial fever, but in 1832 it was the arena for Europe’s latest conflict.*** After the creation of the modern state of Belgium in 1831, the previous rulers, the Dutch, had refused to give up Antwerp. They were soon besieged by Belgian and French soldiers. Perhaps mindful that he could see completed what he and the rest of Lord Chatham’s force never achieved in 1809, Campbell decided to go and watch.

  Given the overwhelming numerical superiority of the besiegers, the eventual surrender of Antwerp was assured, and after an eighteen-day bombardment, the Dutch capitulated on 23 December. Though he had been besieged at Cadiz and Tarifa, and besieger at San Sebastian, Campbell had never been inside a town after it had fallen: ‘No language can convey an idea of the picture of desolation which the interior exhibited’, he wrote. ‘Every building destroyed, and the whole interior ploughed up in every direction with shot and shell.’ He was oddly shocked by the youth of the defenders, whom he described in the main as 21 years old or younger (by which age he had served in the army for six years). With an ability to compartmentalise the horrors of warfare and the military skill required to press it home, Campbell took a vicarious pleasure in it all: ‘To have been present at and to have witnessed the operations of a siege commenced and carried on en regle … has given me the greatest satisfaction.’

  Campbell had used furloughs in 1828 and 1829 to explore Germany and so after the fall of Antwerp he headed for Marburg. Despite a recurrence of his old fever, he continued on to Düsseldorf and Bonn in the spring and summer of 1833, to improve his German. This urge for self-improvement was all very well, but it was crucial that Campbell lean forward in his chair from time to time to remind Horse Guards that he was still there. That was hard to do from Bonn. On 11 October 1833, nearly a year into his continental peregrinations, Campbell received an unexpected letter from a London friend. ‘Two or three occasions had arisen on which my name had been mentioned’, wrote Campbell, ‘and in all likelihood I would have been employed had I been on the spot’, but with Campbell abroad other men had been chosen. These assignments were not ‘on full pay as lieutenant-colonel of a regiment’, Campbell explained, ‘which must come nevertheless by-and-by, but on particular service, which, though temporary, helps to keep a man under the eyes of the public and men in office … This communication overthrew all my quiet arrangements which I had been contemplating to make during the winter … I joyfully prepared to leave the following evening for England.’87

  Once back in London, on 25 October, Campbell went first to see the commander-in-chief, Lord Hill, confident that he returned a better man. He had submitted exhaustive analysis of the siege of Antwerp unprompted. Merit and professionalism had only limited influence at Horse Guards, so if Campbell felt his work would turn heads, he was being over-confident. Four days later he saw Fitzroy Somerset to reiterate his desire for active service. Sir Benjamin D’Urban was in town, having returned from the Caribbean, and was about to sail south to take up his new post as governor of the Cape. Campbell dined with him several times and asked him to have a discreet word in the right ear, but D’Urban laboured in vain and so, on 20 November 1833, Campbell set off on a rare trip to see his family.

  Instead of heading back to Scotland, he went to visit his cousins, the Coninghams. Campbell’s maternal aunt, Elizabeth Campbell, had married John Coningham, with whom she had two children, Hester and Robert. Hester had gone on to marry a thrusting young journalist called Edward Sterling, a staff writer on The Times since 1813, and a man who almost single-handedly changed the
tenor of the paper, with a new, blistering, stentorian style of editorial. ‘He, more than any other man or character, was The Times newspaper, and thundered through it to the shaking of the spheres’, observed Thomas Carlyle.88 Hester’s son, the author John Sterling, kept up a regular correspondence with Thomas Carlyle and his wife Jane, in which, by the early 1840s, there are mentions of Hester’s housekeeper, one Alicia Campbell.89 Barring a staggering coincidence, it would seem that by the early 1840s Campbell had secured his spinster sister Alicia a job, easing the financial burden of her maintenance. It was exactly the type of work suited to a respectable, middle-aged but unmarried lady of her background, and if she was a housekeeper in the early 1840s she might well have been working in the Sterlings’ household in the 1830s as well. As the Sterlings lived in London it was, furthermore, highly convenient for her brother.

  By April 1834, convinced of the impossibility of a new position landing in his lap, Campbell returned to Holland and contracted his old fever again. But the faintest prospect of an active role acted like a twitch on the thread, and in May he was back in London again. When he had left Germany the previous autumn Campbell’s intention had been to secure some new post as a half-pay lieutenant-colonel, but by early 1834 his ambitions had broadened. Now he was angling for a full-pay lieutenant-colonelcy. For an officer loaded with debt who had, only nine years before, been a captain, this was, to put it mildly, optimistic. The year 1834 was not an auspicious time to be looking for a promotion. The new king, William IV, though more at ease with senior officers from untitled backgrounds than his predecessor, was still a congenital conservative. In front of two generals of contrasting background, he exclaimed, ‘You my Lord, are descended from the Plantagenets … and you are descended from the very dregs of the people.’90

  Moreover, ‘over-regulation’ payments were spiralling upwards. Lord Brudenell had purchased the lieutenant-colonelcy of the 15th Hussars in 1832 for a reputed £35,000. After being forcibly removed from command in 1834, he then paid £40,000 for the lieutenant-colonelcy of the 11th Hussars. What hope did Campbell have against such profligacy? The only other possibility was a vacancy without purchase, but they were as rare as hens’ teeth. There was a great rump of half-pay lieutenant-colonels, left over from the reduction of the army after Waterloo. Most had served for far longer than Campbell. The Army List of 1833 shows 190 half-pay colonels senior to him. The chance of a full-pay lieutenant-colonelcy appearing without purchase, and being declined by the scores of officers senior to him, was so small as to be virtually non-existent. The likelihood of new lieutenant-colonelcies being created due to an expansion of the army was just as minute. The Great Reform Act of 1832 had ushered in a new tranche of parliamentarians critical of the army and keen to reduce it further. ‘It is almost a hopeless case to indulge in the belief that they [Horse Guards] can employ me without paying the difference, which I have not to give’, he confided to his journal. His finances, already stretched by the commissions he had purchased, had been further dented by his reduced income as a half-pay colonel and the cost of his travels. Meanwhile, though without wife or child, Campbell was still chief breadwinner for both his surviving sister and his father, who had moved back to Islay in semi-retirement. The skills of cabinetmakers like John were being replaced by new technology: machine carving, mechanical saws and power lathes. The age of Chippendale, Sheraton and Hepplewhite was giving way to mass production. Since his father had given up work, Campbell had increased his allowance. With this additional cost, it was hard to see how he could ever pay back his prodigious debts.

  Consequently, when, in May 1834, Campbell was offered the lieutenant-colonelcy of the 62nd Foot he had to turn it down, as it was by purchase only. In July he was briefly buoyed up by the possibility of a vacancy in the 36th only to find himself passed over. ‘It was very foolish of an old fellow like me to be giving way to such hopes,’ he confessed, ‘aware as I was that there were two hundred candidates before me upon the list.’ A chance encounter with some Fusilier officers disheartened him still further. ‘The dress reminded me of the sacrifice I had made in giving up my regiment for the unattached’, he wrote. As the weeks of inactivity in London passed and still no vacancy appeared, so he became more depressed. When Campbell discovered that he had not even been considered for a vacancy in the 76th he seemed to lose all hope: ‘I feel quite at a loss what to be about or how to act.’ Furthermore, staying in the capital was draining his funds. ‘My means are wholly inadequate for London’, he complained, yet at the same time he knew ‘it would be unwise and impolitic to absent myself from the occasional presence of the authorities.’

  Desperation now drove him to consider the unthinkable. Following the incumbent’s death in September, he applied to be Governor of Sierra Leone. A byword for disease ever since Britain had taken it over as a crown colony in 1808, this was the most poisonous corner of the empire. In the previous decade there had been fourteen governors. The latest, Octavius Temple, had lasted just eight months. ‘I cannot reconcile myself to the idea of you going to Sierra Leone’, wrote Fitzroy Somerset:

  The situation of the governor is a very arduous one, and is very ill paid … However long you may retain it, there is no chance of your gaining credit in the administration of the government, nor would you forward your professional views. I would therefore recommend you to abandon the notion of asking for such employment.

  Campbell wisely dropped the idea. The man sent in his stead, Henry Dundas Campbell, died four months after stepping off the boat.

  Campbell seemed destined to eke out an existence as a washed-up, unmarried, middle-aged lieutenant-colonel, saddled with debts impossible to repay. As he defined himself by his work, so the lack of anything to get his teeth into left him bereft: ‘Here have I been lingering on from week to week, and month to month, in the expectation and belief that some opening would offer which would enable them to employ me, always a prisoner to London and its immediate neighbourhood. It has been a sickening time to me.’ It was the first recorded instance of what was to become a recurrent malaise.

  Then in February 1835 a glimmer of hope appeared. His old regiment, the 9th Foot, was to sail for India, which meant the appointment of an additional lieutenant-colonel. Immediately Campbell contacted his old friend and commander in the Peninsula, Major-General Sir John Cameron, and asked him to recommend him for the new position. Since 1833 Cameron had been colonel of the regiment, making him better placed than anyone to swing things in Campbell’s favour. It worked. On 25 April Lord Hill confirmed that the lieutenant-colonelcy was his. There was, however, one rather large proviso. He would be promoted lieutenant-colonel in the 9th Foot without purchase, but from there Hill wanted him to exchange into the 98th Foot. The problem was that the 98th was rumoured to be earmarked for reduction. If Campbell moved to the 9th and then exchanged into the 98th, only for the latter to be disbanded, it would leave him right back where he started, on half-pay. Was this some kind of elaborate ruse to leave Campbell without a chair when the music stopped?

  Fitzroy Somerset summoned him to his office to persuade him. ‘He declared that he knew nothing of any intended reduction’, recorded Campbell, which was of course not to say categorically that it wouldn’t happen. Unlike the 98th, which was to stay in England, the 9th offered Campbell the chance to free himself from debt, though at considerable personal risk. ‘In India for four or five years, say seven absent from home, I had the prospect of laying by £5,000’,* he mused in his journal, ‘but then I must be confident of my health, which I could not be – my old, miserable Demerara fever should certainly return, and permanently too after a short stay in Bengal. The inconvenience would be perpetual and my life would be miserable.’ ‘The command of a regiment in England for the next four or five years, and the certainty of employment in case of a European war,** together with the chance of distinction to be gained therein, would be preferred by me to the mere acquisition of money in India’, he told Fitzroy Somerset.

  Agreeing to Hil
l’s proposal should have been a moment of accomplishment, but Campbell was strangely lugubrious. His new commission ‘would give me five years of home service, a good deal of trouble in managing a home regiment, but the great likelihood of the preservation and enjoyment of the little health which has been left to me’, he wrote. ‘Beyond the desire to be independent of all pecuniary relief, I care not a straw for money, nor its accumulation.’91

  He was gazetted lieutenant-colonel in the 9th Foot on 8 May 1835, without purchase. To celebrate he went out and bought a set of William Napier’s History of the War in the Peninsula and Jones’s Journals of Sieges. For Campbell this was the breakthrough, for after that, purchase meant nothing. ‘It is the most important step in the service for an officer to obtain’, he later wrote, ‘for none … can hereafter pass over you, and this feeling is one of exceeding comfort to the mind of a soldier who is without much interest, and can lay no other claim to consideration than what his own merits and services are likely to command.’92 Sir John Cameron told him three days later: