Victoria’s Scottish Lion

by Greenwood, Adrian; Haythornthwaite, Philip;

  I congratulate you most sincerely on the event, which I am very sure will be hailed with satisfaction by the corps in which you so early distinguished yourself. Your old friend Seward*** will rejoice at your return, and I believe he is the only one now with it of whom you can have any recollection.

  But Cameron soon discovered that Campbell’s stay in the 9th was to be measured in days only, and that he would have to put up with Lieutenant-Colonel McCaskill from the 98th instead. After Campbell’s exchange on 19 June, Cameron wrote to him a second time: ‘Better had it not been gazetted at all, than that you should have had to leave us again.’93

  The bulk of the 98th Foot was still abroad. Raised in 1824, its service companies had been in the Cape ever since, engaging in light guard duty but no fighting. Its recall had yet to be confirmed, so in the meantime Campbell began another month-long trip to the Rhine. On his return, Horse Guards dithered as to whether to send him to Africa or keep him in Britain to await his regiment. Finally, in the summer of 1837, the 98th landed at Portsmouth. Campbell headed for the south coast to welcome them home.

  The raw material of the regiment was on the whole fairly sound, though marred by the presence of a few hardened drinkers. Drunkenness was tolerated by many commanders, but Campbell always had a Puritanical streak. Harshly, by the standards of the time, he summarily discharged the worst offenders. Next he banned all wine in the officers’ mess except port and sherry, although in this instance his motivation was economy rather than sobriety: to spare the poorer officers the high mess bills which came with more comprehensive wine lists. ‘I found it necessary to regulate all such expenditure, and to control what appeared to me to be extravagance with a firm hand, even at the risk of unpopularity’, he wrote.94 The novelty of Campbell’s approach is exemplified by his polar opposite, Lieutenant-Colonel James Brudenell, the 7th Earl of Cardigan, a lord who, according to the United Service Gazette, ‘considers the neophyte as little better than a snob who cannot emulate to a certain extent the example of his commanding officer’.95 One of Cardigan’s lieutenants had been forced to sell his commission after running up debts of over £17,000, an easy business in a mess that scorned moderation. In contrast, the 98th was far more inclusive. ‘The officers were instructed, and shared their duties, with the soldiers,’ explained Shadwell, ‘and by the development of the company system, under which the captains and subalterns were brought into intimate relations with the non-commissioned officers and privates, a knowledge of each other was obtained, and a feeling of confidence engendered between the several ranks.’ Campbell soon ‘succeeded in establishing and maintaining such feeling and esprit de corps in all ranks as made both officers and soldiers happy and proud of serving under his command’.96 The two contrasting command styles of Campbell and Cardigan would be tested in quick succession in battle at Balaklava, twenty years later.

  Campbell’s discriminating approach in Ireland commended him to command a garrison town of unusual sensitivity, and so, in July 1839, the 98th (bar a small detachment posted to the Isle of Man) was ordered to Newcastle, where the political divisions of 1832 still endured. Though the railways were spreading across Britain, the 98th Foot travelled north the old-fashioned way, by punishing daily marches. When they reached York they halted for a rest day. It was one of those glorious, cloudless July Sundays. Campbell was staying at a coaching inn while his men relaxed. York was serene.

  Then at noon, into Campbell’s pub strode one of the most extraordinary generals in the British army: Major-General Charles Napier. In Thackeray’s words, he had ‘a beak like an eagle and a beard like a Cashmere goat’.97 His whiskers reached his waist, the eccentricity of this Biblical effect enhanced by his habit of shaving just his chin. His character was as singular as his appearance. This ‘queer compound of petulance, egotism and prejudice, with flashes of wit and even genius’98 was to be one of the greatest influences on Campbell (see Plate 7).

  Napier had been commissioned into the 33rd Foot aged just 12. His liberal leanings developed during a stint as ADC to Sir James Duff, commander in Limerick, where he saw the rough justice meted out to the Irish peasantry and soon grew sick of it. Under Moore in Spain he had commanded the 50th Foot. Wounded five times at the Battle of Corunna before being captured by the French, he returned, after an exchange of prisoners, to serve on Wellington’s staff. A Promethean spirit over-flowing with self-belief, he was not shy of explaining to his superiors how their methods could be improved. During the Anglo-American War of 1812–14 he proposed raising an army from American slaves who would fight in exchange for their freedom. His plan was never adopted. Napier complained that the generals were scared that freed slaves with military training might unsettle the British West Indies. For Napier, the army’s disapproval merely proved its entrenched conservatism and the existence of establishment forces arrayed against him.

  Napier revelled in being a rebel, championing quixotic causes, however unpalatable they were to those around him. While serving in the Ionian Islands he supported Greek independence and published a pamphlet condemning Turkish atrocities. This commended him to Lord Byron and the two became great friends, but associating with poets and freedom fighters did not endear Napier to the British high command.

  As military resident in Cephalonia he had striven to be a benign despot, enacting his own plans for enlightened government to raise a people, in his opinion, unjustly snared in barbarism. Not for the last time his indomitable faith in his own abilities collided with the doubts of his superiors and in 1830 he was removed from command. For Napier this was all a plot by London bigwigs, jealously trying to thwart his ambitions. He turned to theory instead and penned an essay on the humane colonisation of South Australia.

  Napier’s personality, brimful of energy and idealism, had one over-riding flaw: he could start a fight in an empty room. He displayed an unequalled knack for irritating people and it rubbed off on Campbell. It was tempered with charm – he had made it to major-general after all – and deep down he seemed to yearn for acceptance from the very establishment against which he constantly kicked. Whether as a result of Napier’s influence, or simply because they were cut of the same cloth, Campbell ended up doing the same.

  They shared much in common. Napier believed the army should be ‘remodelled so that young aristocrats may not be forced by their faction into the command of regiments while old soldiers are left on half-pay’. He enjoyed casting himself as the talented but poor Scotsman, held back by wealthier, senior officers.* ‘Generally speaking the man of ancient lineage with an empty purse makes a good soldier’, he wrote for his own benefit, though it could equally have applied to Campbell.99 In reality, Napier had never been impoverished. With the Duchess of Leinster as his aunt, this cri de pauvre was frankly absurd, but it was enough for Napier to feel put upon to see Campbell as a kindred spirit.

  Ten years Campbell’s senior, Napier had been appointed commander of the army’s Northern District of Britain in April 1839. Having inspected his domain, Napier had stopped off in York on his way south. After a brief introduction, he decided to put Campbell on the spot. Pulling out his watch, he explained that he was not staying long, just for lunch, and that his coach was soon to leave. In the interim, would Campbell be so kind as to collect his men under arms?

  This was a pretty mean request: the men had spent all morning in the taverns of York. Nevertheless, Campbell was confident that they would turn out sober and in good time. Taking Napier’s whim in his stride, he ordered the assembly be sounded. Napier and Campbell returned to their lunch, while the men formed up in front of the inn. Once mustered, Napier examined the ranks. Turning to Campbell he declared, ‘That’s what I call inspecting a regiment!’100

  One reason for the rarity of revolution in Britain has been the ability of the the ruling class to sense the moment to compromise. By the late 1830s Whig prime minister Lord Melbourne knew the appetite for reform was still unsated. The Great Reform Act of 1832 should have made government more inclusive by extend
ing the franchise to the middle class, giving tracts of society a voice previously denied them, but no bill loaded with such expectations could have provided all the answers people were demanding. It gave the wolf of public discontent a taste and kept it hungry. But now the tradesman and the clerk had the vote they were damned if they were going to let the hoi polloi get their grubby hands on it too.

  By 1839 the motley band riled at the failure of reform had coalesced around the banner of Chartism. By the standards of later radicals, the Chartists were a restrained breed of urban guerrillas; they aimed to storm the Palace of Westminster with petitions. The issues they wanted tackled included trade union rights, the restriction of working hours (especially for children) and reform of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act and the Corn Laws,** but before progressing to those specifics, the Chartists wanted first to give democracy another overhaul by extending the franchise to the working classes and so stop the middle classes pulling the ladder up after them. Their ‘People’s Charter’, published in late spring 1838, called for the reform of representation at Westminster, universal male suffrage, equal constituencies, and pay for MPs. The Chartists’ ‘National Petition’ was the expression of that will and the affirmation of disappointment at the Great Reform Act. As the Petition asserted:

  It was the fond expectation of the people that a remedy for the greater part, if not for the whole, of their grievances, would be found in the Reform Act of 1832. They were taught to regard that Act as a wise means to a worthy end; as the machinery of an improved legislation, when the will of the masses would be at length potential. They have been bitterly and basely deceived.

  The time was ripe for protest. Britain had suffered bad harvests since 1836, an especially severe winter in January 1839, a fall in wages*** and a run on the Bank of England. More than a year was spent collecting signatures. When presented to parliament in May 1839, the petition bore 1.3 million names.

  North-east England was a Chartist hub. New radical societies like the Sunderland Charter Association, the Newcastle Working Men’s Association, the Scarborough Radical Association and numerous branches of the Northern Political Union had sprung up, while papers like the Northern Star gave them a platform. Newcastle was the militant Chartists’ heartland. As a tinderbox of popular revolt, it attracted the most radical Chartist speakers like Feargus O’Connor and Dr John Taylor. ‘North-eastern Chartists talked a fiercely militant game’, explains one historian. ‘Their flamboyant rhetoric, full of allusions to blood and torture and threatening struggle to the death against oppression, filled the air of countless meetings.’101 While the London Chartists preached non-violence, the Newcastle Chartists wanted the gloves off. At a rally of 60–80,000 demonstrators in Newcastle on Christmas Day 1838, banners urged ‘He that hath no sword, let him sell his shirt and buy one.’ One of the speakers sported a tricolour sash. He was scratching a raw nerve. The spectre of Jacobin overthrow, which haunted the mind of every propertied Englishmen, had been lately revived by the Paris Revolution of 1830. This was not just idle talk either. It was backed up with weaponry. At Winlaton, just outside Newcastle, the foundry workers were churning out cannon, hand grenades, pikes and caltrops.* In February 1839 a local Chartist leader even placed an advertisement in the Northern Liberator telling readers that muskets were available at his shop.102

  Already that spring rumours of a Chartist plot to attack the Newcastle barracks had swept through town, though in the event they proved baseless. The Rural Police Bill, proposing wider powers for an enlarged police force, further inflamed opinion. Following the receipt of the National Petition at Westminster on 20 May, a crowd, claimed by the Northern Liberator to have been in excess of 80,000,** gathered on the Town Moor. The magistrates waited, Riot Acts at the ready, but the rally passed off bloodlessly.

  Across the Northern District, Napier had been preparing for an armed Chartist uprising. He was keen to make as much use as possible of the yeomanry so that regular troops like Campbell’s 98th could act as a mobile response force to deal with flashpoints. Unfortunately, the yeomanry was badly depleted*** and very unevenly distributed across the country; County Durham had not a single troop anywhere.103 At the same time, Napier’s force of regular soldiers was completely inadequate given the size of the area they were expected to guard. Aside from 12,000 soldiers in London and Windsor, the rest of mainland Britain was policed by only around 18,000 troops, fewer than 400 men per county. Napier’s territory stretched from the Scottish border, south across Lancashire and Yorkshire to Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire. Since December 1838 he had been granted an extra three infantry and three cavalry regiments, but that still left his force stretched.

  Having said that, Napier did not want to militarise England, nor incite conflict. ‘War is detestable and not to be desired by a nation’, he wrote. ‘It falls not so heavily upon soldiers – it is our calling; but its horrors alight upon the poor, upon the miserable, upon the unhappy, upon those who feel the expense and the suffering, but have not the glory.’104 He was sympathetic to the Chartist cause, he just did not believe direct action was the way to achieve its goals. ‘Bad laws must be reformed by the concentrated reason of the nation gradually acting on the legislature,’ he argued, ‘not by pikes of individuals acting on the bodies of the executive.’105 His strategy was to prevent riots before they broke out but he also believed his soldiers were there to keep the peace, not to obliterate peaceful protests. This went counter to the views of many local magistrates.**** ‘How much more ready in time of war the civilian is than the soldier to call for extreme measures’,106 Napier observed. In Remarks on Military Law (1837) he had maintained that troops should only be called out by a magistrate in extremis, though quite what legally constituted in extremis was unclear. He put his faith in the threat of violence rather than its actuality. ‘Let it be law that being called out the soldiers are to use their arms at once’, he maintained. ‘Were my proposition adopted, the very appearance of troops would be a warning to such people, who would instantly disperse.’107

  Frustrated that he should have to act as ‘dry-nurse to “special constables” and grouse-shooting magistrates’,108 Napier made it clear that troops would only be provided on his terms. One of his causes was improved conditions for the rank and file, so he insisted that barracks be provided free of charge in any town requiring military assistance and constructed anew where necessary. He preferred a few large garrisons to numerous tiny ones scattered across the countryside and detested the use of small detachments, urging his colonels instead to move against troublemakers with not less than two infantry companies and a troop of cavalry.109 Campbell regarded Napier’s ideas as holy writ.*****

  Once in Newcastle, Campbell was besieged by anxious landowners, magistrates and factory owners, all in mortal fear of the vulgar herd rising up and murdering them in their beds. Campbell did not swallow all the scare stories, and to gauge the real risk of revolt he attended Chartist meetings himself. He concluded the magistrates’ panic only encouraged the dissenters. He believed local people ‘have no idea themselves that they can obtain anything by force … but seeing … the state of alarm into which their masters and the authorities are thrown by their demonstrations, they continue them’. For Campbell it was all a game of bluff, the same as in the colonies. As long as he maintained an outward show of calm, matters would not get out of hand. Making one’s opponent believe in the single-mindedness of the men with the muskets was half the battle.

  Meanwhile, the Chartists sought to undermine his command. ‘Every soldier is a slave’, claimed one pamphlet. ‘Remember that a soldier can be tied up and flogged to death before the whole company he belongs to, at the decree of his commanding officers.’110****** Three men of the 98th attended a Chartist meeting in Sunderland on Saturday 20 July but this seems to have been the high-water mark of radicalism in the regiment.111 During one march Chartists seized a drummer boy of the 98th and forced him to play, to suggest the troops had mutinied and joined the mob. A distraught magis
trate, worried the garrison was about to take to the streets in bloody revolution, woke Campbell in the small hours. ‘I will show you what the soldiers think, even though it be the middle of the night’, he said wearily, and called the men to assembly on the parade ground. With the magistrate in tow, Campbell marched down the ranks, quizzing the men on their loyalties. When one enthusiastic soldier shouted that he would gladly ‘stick his own grandmother if she were out’, it put an end to the matter.112

  Behind the false alarms and crying ‘wolf’ was a genuine threat of unrest. The Newcastle delegates to the Chartist Convention, Dr John Taylor and George Harney, were two of the movement’s most incendiary speakers. After riots had engulfed Birmingham (the location of the convention) in early July, Taylor was arrested and on Sunday 7 July a meeting was called at the New Lecture Rooms in Newcastle to formulate a response. Tempers ran high. The main speaker, James Ayre, exhorted his audience to ‘arm themselves with pikes, with muskets, with the firebrand and the torch, and when the property of their opponents was destroyed, they would be as poor as themselves’.113

  The arrest of George Harney the next day lit the blue touch-paper. Harney was hard-core. He had urged the delegates of the convention to storm parliament and enact their own legislation.114 With both their local heroes behind bars, Newcastle’s Chartists were in a bloody mood. ‘Placards were issued immediately for a meeting of the Chartists this evening, on the Forth,’* reported the Northern Star, ‘and it was openly announced that an attempt would be made to obtain possession of the powder magazine at Walker, and the depot for military stores, and also to seize the ordnance at the shot factory’.