Victoria’s Scottish Lion

by Greenwood, Adrian; Haythornthwaite, Philip;

  Violence seemed certain. Campbell, magistrates and police conferred and troops were detailed to guard the powder magazine and shot factory. Meanwhile, Campbell flaunted his dragoons around town and positioned a couple of artillery pieces in public view. Harney’s arrest had coincided with a strike by local joiners, leaving several hundred men on the streets at a loose end. A contingent of ironworkers from Winlaton, armed with daggers, staves and guns, arrived at about 6 p.m. to make an already explosive situation worse, and marched round the town with their own band playing. Campbell, however, remained calm. Protestors gathered at the Forth but the speakers, such as miners’ leader Thomas Hepburn, rather than blowing on the embers, implored the crowd to restrict themselves to peaceful protest. By midnight, their bile spent, the crowd had quietly dispersed.

  Tuesday saw a repeat gathering, again preceded by the Winlaton ironworkers arriving with their band.115 The popularity of these daily rallies would seem to indicate the strength of feeling in Newcastle, but in the early nineteenth century the public was more easily pleased and the existence of a crowd did not necessarily imply support. The Newcastle Courant described the meetings as ‘rather recreative to many and amusing to the inhabitants than otherwise’. Rallies continued every night for a week, although those attending seemed happy to hear about revolution without engaging in it.

  Nevertheless, agitation quickly rippled out from Newcastle. Sunderland hosted a mass meeting on 9 July. Miners at Thornley rampaged round their village armed with staves to ‘persuade’ people to attend. One group of protesters commandeered a train and forced the driver to take them to the meeting. This was a step too far. The ringleaders were arrested, an extra 100 special constables sworn in and the boil in Sunderland lanced.116

  In Durham the magistrates were sure that a miners’ revolt was imminent. Campbell was sceptical. ‘I scarcely think a combination of this character can be made to break out generally and simultaneously, as the magistrate and other gentlemen of the town and neighbourhood seem to apprehend’, he told Napier. ‘When I ask these people for positive proof of anything … I am answered by rumours not by facts.’ He had a sanguine view of logic’s place in industrial unrest. Addressing reports that Chartist leaders were inciting miners to destroy pit machinery, Campbell asserted, ‘they have sense enough to know that it would only be the occasion of depriving themselves and their families of the means of subsistence’.117

  Meanwhile, in London, matters had reached a crisis. On Thursday 11 July, the Council of the Northern Political Union issued An Address to the Middle Classes of the North of England, threatening violence if the ‘shopocracy’ continued to collaborate with the ‘insolent, idle aristocracy’. Regardless, MPs rejected the National Petition the next day.** Now that peaceful political protest had proved ineffectual, the fomenters of armed struggle saw their chance. In 1839 news still travelled, by and large, no faster than a horse, so the first inklings of the petition’s rejection did not reach Newcastle until 13 July. ‘If nothing takes place in the course of the coming week in consequence of this great disappointment,’ Campbell informed Napier that day, ‘I am in great hopes that the excitement which has been kept up so long, and has been so active hitherto, will then gradually subside.’118 Although things went quiet, Napier detected mounting restlessness below the surface. ‘The spirit of revolution is strong and increasing’,119 he told Home Secretary, Lord John Russell on 16 July. Though after 17 July the meetings held daily since the arrest of the Newcastle delegates were scaled back to one a week, withdrawals from savings banks rose markedly and local shopkeepers noticed a drop off in the amount spent by pitmen. The Chartists were saving up for a strike.

  It was not long before the violence recurred. What started as a brawl outside a Newcastle pub on 20 July escalated into mass vandalism, the crowd’s anger focused on a bank and the offices of the anti-Chartist Tyne Mercury.120 ‘Everything seems to show that the riot originated with a fight, or fights, which in the outset, had no political bearing’, claimed the Newcastle Courant.121 The response of the local magistrates to this mini riot was to run about like a lot of wet hens. They demanded more cavalry be stationed in Newcastle, which Napier predictably declined, and further requested arms for 1,000 new special constables. Again Napier felt that an extra 1,000 untrained, armed policemen aged from 11 to 70 was not the best prescription for peace. Denied the muscle they wanted, the magistrates now banned further public meetings completely.

  The proscription went unheeded. Ignoring the handbills distributed throughout the town announcing the ban, a crowd of around 2,000* gathered at the Forth on 30 July. If they dragged Newcastle into chaos, much of the north would follow. The mayor, John Fife, and the clerk to the magistrates demanded they disperse but received only abuse and the odd stone in response. Fife was a hate figure for many Chartists. An ex-member of the Northern Political Union who had supported the extension of the franchise in the early 1830s, by 1839 he had become, in the eyes of many Chartists, a sell-out.122 With the mood of the crowd worsening, Fife sent a local doctor to rouse the garrison. At around 8 p.m. Campbell received word that the trouble, so long expected, had begun.

  The crowd, with banners aloft, began to march down Collingwood Street. Five hundred police were waiting for them round the corner in Westgate Street. Hurrying to the hub of the protest, Campbell drew up the 98th’s grenadier company – his heaviest, stockiest soldiers – behind the police lines. ‘The police on seeing the troops coming down Westgate Street, dashed forward unexpectedly into the midst of the Chartists’, reported Campbell. The mayor ordered the policemen to seize the protestors’ banners, but the Chartists defended them like regimental colours, and started retaliating with bricks, so the police ‘retreated upon the troops’.

  Meanwhile, more protestors had reached Scotswood Road. Here the mayor read the Riot Act several times, to no effect. This time Campbell moved his men forward first, warning the crowd that unless they dispersed, his troops would fire. ‘The troops then moved forward’, wrote Campbell, ‘and the people gave way in every direction.’ The troop of 7th Dragoon Guards under Campbell’s command set about clearing both roads of protestors. ‘Fully five sixths’ of them, according to Campbell, were only ‘14 to 16 years of age. There was also a large sprinkling of women and a very great number of well-dressed persons whose curiosity had brought [them] to the spot.’123 Around Mosley Street and St Nicholas’s Square, Campbell and Fife supervised efforts to dislodge the last clusters of protestors. By midnight, ten Chartists had been charged with offences124 and almost all the rest chased away, but ‘the troops remained in Town until past 2 o’clock in the morning’, just in case. ‘If the authorities had been less firm, or on the other hand if their actions had caused serious injuries and/or deaths,’ argued one historian, ‘events might have gone out of control then or shortly after.’125 Campbell had walked that tightrope with great sure-footedness.

  Remembered in Newcastle as the ‘Battle of the Forth’, the confrontation was labelled by one local writer as ‘the Peterloo of Newcastle … characterized by the same daring assertion of human rights and the same harsh measures of repression on the part of those in authority’. Quite what these ‘harsh measures of repression’ were, which resulted in scarcely any casualties, the writer does not specify.126 ‘This was almost on the scale of regular warfare’, claimed another Chartist historian,127 a sentiment one can’t help thinking Campbell would have thought rather overstated. Several constables and horses were injured by projectiles, but the authorities suffered no human fatalities. On the Chartist side, ‘some people were hurt by the Police, and one man died, of his wounds’, reported Campbell, but as far as his troops were concerned, ‘the people offered us scarcely any molestation or opposition’, and the 98th caused no casualties.

  According to Campbell, the people now became ‘moderate since they have seen that they cannot obtain their wishes by force and violence, and that this course deprived their cause of the interest and sympathy of every other class of the c
ommunity. I hear much of other meetings and threats of coming into Town by large bodies of miners.’ But, he felt, ‘it will not go farther than threats’.128 The Chartist leadership returned to civil disobedience and called for a general strike on 12 August. Though this was subsequently postponed by the National Convention, Newcastle’s Chartists nevertheless stuck to the original plan. As in July, local magistrates were rattled. Extra police were recruited. In Darlington, 100 special constables were sworn in and in Stockton a further 235.129 In southern Northumberland, Chelsea out-pensioners were issued with cutlasses and pistols. Every town and pit village demanded troops. Napier turned down every request apart from Durham and South Shields.** In Newcastle the mayor wanted a gun positioned on the roof of the gaol so it could be fired in an emergency to summon Campbell’s men from the barracks, but this idea was kicked into the long grass by referring it to the Home Office.130

  When strike day came, support was lacklustre. At Thornley, Littletown, Sherburn and across South Durham, pits were brought to a standstill, and at Winlaton the ironworkers downed tools, but it scarcely constituted a general strike. Campbell reported just four collieries closed north of the Tyne. ‘The attempt to force a General Strike has been a complete failure’, he reported.131 Even the Chartist press discouraged readers from joining the protest. In Newcastle, a meeting of ‘strikers’ at the Forth numbered just forty and most of them were present because they had the day off. Violence was anticipated near the small village of Seghill, north of Newcastle, and magistrates requested Campbell’s men police a demonstration called by strikers at nearby Whitridge, but by the time the 98th arrived the meeting was already breaking up. Campbell and the justices made a short tour of the area as a show of strength but it was scarcely needed.

  The next day Campbell wrote confidently that ‘The neck of the business appears to me to have got a wrench and everything appears to promise improvement.’132 ‘They are too well off to make good rebels’,* Napier observed, though wealth did nothing to reduce the frequency of his own tantrums. The Mayor of Newcastle confirmed to Campbell on 20 September that the time had ‘arrived when the civil power seems, by itself, enabled to enforce the law’.133

  That autumn was for Campbell a charmed time. By unsettling the moral majority and enhancing respect for the army, the Chartists had inadvertently subverted further army cuts. The 98th, well drilled and efficient, had repaid his trust and pulled the fat out of the fire. In Napier he had a commander for whom he had complete respect. Aside from one or two regimental niggles – the court martial of the paymaster, Captain Dunleavy, for various ‘irregularities’ and the sudden death of a soldier in a brothel134 – by the late autumn, Campbell felt comfortable enough to ask for a short period of leave.

  Facing one’s own countrymen in anger is surely the most onerous and delicate task for a soldier. As Fortescue put it, ‘An officer who has the courage to act with decision in aid of the civil power, still does so at his peril. To this day he cannot feel sure of the support of the civil authorities, but may find himself sacrificed to further the selfish ends of politicians.’135 Too light a touch and the military is blamed; too heavy a crackdown and the military is blamed. Campbell judged it just right, and earned himself praise from all quarters. The county magistrates thanked him for his help. Lord John Russell commended him for his ‘prompt and valuable services’ and for the ‘zeal manifested by you in supporting the civil authorities, and in the preservation of the public peace’. The commander-in-chief, Lord Hill, the Mayor of Newcastle (shortly to be knighted for his handling of the situation), and Napier were all gushing in their praise. Most extraordinary of all, he enjoyed the benediction of sections of the Chartist press, and even those who did not applaud him were generally neutral.

  Respect for Campbell and the 98th among the public remained high throughout. His troops were frequently welcomed by the very people who were supposedly on the point of tearing them to shreds. ‘On passing up and down Newcastle and Gateshead, the troops were cheered by the people. We mention this incident in order to show that the mass of the people … entertain a kindly feeling towards the soldiery’, declared the radical Chartist Northern Liberator.136 The same paper, following an inspection of the 98th that November, complimented Napier for the way in which he ‘most justly and deservedly praised this fine body of men for their soldier-like appearance, and high state of discipline’.137 There was a noticeable lack of friction between soldier and Novocastrian. One private was given four months for perjury in July 1839, another sentenced to two weeks’ hard labour for assault in October 1839 and a third charged with the same a few weeks later, but such instances were rare. In the last two cases the victims were policemen, so rather than inflame local feeling it was more likely to do the opposite.138

  ‘The 98th Regiment is the best drilled and disciplined of the district’,** declared Napier that October. ‘Campbell, excellent himself, has made his officers so: Majors Gregory and Eyre are very superior young men.’139 ‘When I know the commanding officer, I know the regiment’, Napier exclaimed. By 1840 the frequent letters between Campbell and Napier show a warm regard for one another. ‘If I had a son, he should be with you in a week out of any regiment in the army’, he told Campbell in November 1840.140

  Across the north-east, at house parties and soirées, Campbell was feted by those whose houses and factories he had protected. Among the grateful gentry and industrialists were many a Mr Bennett with young vixens to offload. To the casual observer Campbell could conform to the Austenian ideal; at times diffident, a man whose sensitive nature was masked by a bluff, soldierly exterior. Shadwell tantalisingly speaks of Campbell’s ‘brief sojourn in the north’ as ‘[not] without some romance in it, the recollection of which was a frequent source of pleasure to him in after-years’,***141 but is disappointingly short on detail. This is the one and only hint at sex made by Shadwell in his whole two-volume account.

  Practical considerations made marriage difficult. Campbell’s father was alive and his spinster sister would not be able to work as a housekeeper forever. He still had large debts and so, even on a lieutenant-colonel’s salary, he could only afford a frugal wife. Perhaps he could not reconcile his quest for war with the idea of family and the risk of leaving a wife widowed and children without income. Perhaps he never met a woman prepared to put up with his temperament or one patient enough to see if his promise as an officer was fully realised. Then again, Shadwell’s contention that ‘his lively and agreeable conversation, as well as his conspicuously delicate and refined manners … made him a remarkable favourite with ladies both young and old’ does not seem to be mere puff. In most women’s memoirs, Campbell generally got a positive and sometimes an adulatory press. On occasion, he demonstrated an eye for them too. When an Indian civil servant asked Campbell whether he should help one of Lucknow’s woman evacuees, the 65-year-old replied ‘Is she pretty, man?’142

  As 1839 drew to a close, and their popular support declined, the most militant of the Chartist leaders turned desperate. The full-scale revolt planned by a radical clique for 11–12 January turned out to be a washout, with only seventy of the expected 700 men bothering to turn up.143 This embarrassing imbroglio ended with a whimper as some of the ringleaders fled to America. According to one Chartist historian, it was ‘the last desperate throw of a frustrated elite who had been deprived of their followers by the preponderant demonstration of government power’.144

  Campbell was not convinced and remained on the qui vive. The closure of the Chartist newspaper the Northern Liberator was taken by some in London, such as Lord Normanby, as a sign that Chartism was dead, but as Campbell reported to Napier on 14 January 1840, ‘the extinction of this paper is not received by anyone in this neighbourhood, acquainted with the working classes, as any proof of any change in their opinions on the subject of Chartism’.145 However, for the next year Newcastle remained calm.

  Throughout this time one company of the 98th had been stationed on the Isle of Man. Campbell was e
ager to reunite his regiment. In 1839, Napier had tried his best to have the company recalled, convinced they were superfluous. ‘I should think an old cannon of Queen Elizabeth’s time and an invalid bombardier would be quite enough to regulate the price of potatoes and all other garrison duties’, he told Campbell, but for once Napier’s optimism was misplaced.

  The Manx shilling was still valued at 14d rather than the 12d of the mainland equivalent. This meant that if you exported £12 of Manx copper coins to the mainland, you made £2 on the deal. Consequently, the island had been almost denuded of copper coinage, and so the British government imposed a twelve pence shilling in January 1840, an act ratified by the Tynwald on 17 March. The islanders felt short-changed, and riots broke out in Douglas. ‘The windows and doors of the houses of the legislators, and of those shopkeepers who were favourable to the change, were demolished’, wrote Manx historian Joseph Train. ‘The Riot Act was read, the military called out, and the principal portion of the respectable inhabitants sworn in as special constables; but it was not until a company of soldiers had arrived from Liverpool that the Island was restored to its wonted tranquillity.’146

  Fortunately for Campbell, that was the only riot the 98th had to contend with that year. ‘There has taken place one great change in the habits of the lower classes which will eventually do more for the enfranchisement of the people themselves, as well as the country, than the legislation of either Whig or Tory’, he told Napier. ‘They have become a sober people.’147 In mid-January 1841 Campbell’s old fever consigned him to his sickbed, and that same month he was ‘terribly grieved in finding myself obliged to bring a grenadier to trial for theft … This is the first man tried for theft from a comrade since I joined the 98th.’ Generally speaking, though, the regiment was well ordered, and its lieutenant-colonel in good spirits. The twelfth of May was cause for celebration as Napier presented the 98th with new colours at Newcastle racecourse. The major-general could not resist quoting a passage from the recently published sixth volume of his brother’s History of the Peninsular War, describing the first assault on San Sebastian. ‘It was in vain that Lieutenant Campbell, breaking through the tumultuous crowd with the survivors of his chosen detachment, mounted the ruins – twice he ascended, twice he was wounded, and all around him died’, he read. ‘There!’ shouted Napier. ‘There stands Lieutenant Campbell!’