Victoria’s Scottish Lion

by Greenwood, Adrian; Haythornthwaite, Philip;

  In July 1841 the 98th sailed for Ireland for election policing duties, prior to another colonial posting. The scale of Britain’s imperial commitments demanded further foreign service and, after Ireland, the regiment’s new home was to be Mauritius. Campbell requested leave to return to London, ostensibly to visit friends, but in fact to lobby for a change of destination for the 98th. He preferred Bermuda.

  A Canadian named Alexander McLeod had been arrested on a charge of murder in the USA, encouraging Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston to threaten reprisals unless McLeod was repatriated. ‘The state of our relations with America, respecting the imprisonment and trial of McLeod, made it more than probable that a war would ensue between the two countries’, wrote Campbell. ‘Bermuda in this case would become a point of the first importance, where the regiment could not fail of being very actively and prominently employed.’148 He should have known better than to think every bit of sabre-rattling by Palmerston was an overture to war.

  Fitzroy Somerset, however, was unmoveable. He could not rearrange dispositions to suit the whims of a single colonel. Knowing that trouble threatened in the east, Campbell asked Fitzroy Somerset to consider posting the 98th to India or China, but it was no use; the troops were off to Mauritius, with or without Campbell’s blessing. Fitzroy Somerset indicated that if, on arrival in Mauritius, Campbell exchanged with the lieutenant-colonel of the 87th Royal Irish Fusiliers stationed there, it would be with the commander-in-chief’s approval. Campbell was still not keen, reluctant to leave a regiment he had spent so long perfecting. Then, in October, Campbell heard that Fitzroy Somerset had changed his mind. The 98th Foot was to be sent to China. ‘I think we owe this distinction to you, my dear General’, he told Napier.149

  Presented in 1835 with the choice of either exchange into the 98th to be on hand for a European war, or remaining in the 9th and heading to India to make his fortune, Campbell chose the domestic posting. Yet in late 1841 he chose China. For Campbell it was the least bad option. The Far East at least promised an end to debt through plunder. Looting an enemy city taken by storm was an accepted element of war and the British had already racked up quite a gazetteer of conquests in China. Heroes need opportunities. Campbell had had few since 1813 to show anything other than administrative and policing skills. Now, after a gap of twenty-eight years, he was off to war.

  Notes

  * He soon gained a captaincy because of seniority anyway.

  ** The fourth son of George III, field marshal and father of Queen Victoria.

  ** Maine was still part of Massachusetts, and not a separate state as it is today.

  *** Subsequently returned to the USA in the Treaty of Ghent in December 1814.

  * While he was in Barbados Campbell’s pension, awarded for his injuries, lapsed. Shadwell claimed that Campbell didn’t bother to reapply due to the low cost of living in the Caribbean, but the West Indies was expensive. According to his 1829 service record, the pension was temporary and intended to lapse in 1820.

  ** Slaves tended to take their owner’s surname, and contemporary sources refer to them as Jack Gladstone and Quamina Gladstone. Ironically, Sir John was very much on the liberal wing of slave owners and a keen supporter of Canning’s version of the Buxton motion.

  * Really more of a large machete, used for cutting sugar cane.

  * Gibbets were still in use in Britain even as late as 1832 (Burn, 57).

  * Smith assumed that priests were exempt. A Wesleyan missionary, Mr Cheesewright, was granted exemption (Chamberlin, 65). Also the Rev. John Mortimer, a Methodist minister, was turned down when he offered to serve (Northcott, 68). Article IV of the island’s Militia Regulations clearly states that ‘persons in holy orders’ were exempt, so Smith was legally in the right (Anon., Local Guide, 15).

  ** Regulars and militia officers were not allowed to sit on the same court martial, and the appointment of officers to a court martial was supposed to be by roster to avoid packing or selecting (Stocqueler, 238). Murray appears simply to have ignored this.

  ** This was completely ineffectual, as the objection was reproduced in verbatim transcripts of the trial.

  * Wellington was concerned in February 1811 to discover that the 9th Foot held Methodist meetings (Brett-James, Wellington at War, 213).

  ** Shadwell describes Campbell’s stay in the Caribbean as an opportunity ‘to enjoy the pleasant society which, prior to the abolition of slavery, was to be met with in our West Indian colonies’ (Shadwell, I, 42).

  *** After whom the city of Durban, South Africa is named.

  * In November 1823 a contingent of the 93rd Highlanders had arrived in Demarara to keep the peace.

  * Whether or not Major Thomas charged an illegal ‘over-regulation’ payment on top, no record survives. Given that the vacancy was in the pestilent West Indies, Campbell may have been the only applicant and therefore had no need to grease Thomas’s palm.

  * William Gladstone would in later life mark his diary with a small whip symbol each time he met a prostitute as part of his nocturnal attempts to save fallen women. Presumably not quite what Dr Keate intended.

  ** The Royal Navy in contrast had had a strong evangelical strand for some years (see Blake).

  * Anyone taking up civil or military office had to take an oath of allegiance declaring against transubstantiation, the invocation of saints and the sacrament of Mass, which in effect excluded Catholics from public office.

  * Perhaps the most notorious of rotten boroughs was Old Sarum, which from the fourteenth century had sent two MPs to Westminster. By 1831 it had just eleven eligible voters, none of whom lived in the area. Among pocket boroughs High Wycombe was one of the worst: all thirty-four voters were tenants of Sir John Dashwood.

  ** As it turned out, Leahy retired in 1835 and bought an estate in New South Wales, where he died in 1839.

  * The lieutenant-colonelcy cost £2,700 but Campbell received £1,400 back for his majority, leaving him a net £1,300 to pay.

  ** The army felt it prudent to keep a certain number of officers on half-pay as a reserve.

  *** Campbell’s cousin Lieutenant Anthony Sterling was serving there with the 3rd (Prince of Wales’s) Dragoon Guards, which may have influenced his decision (Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 161).

  * This money would come from the many additional civil and staff appointments offered in India. ‘In no service in the world are the pay and allowances upon so liberal a scale as in that of the East India Company’ (Stocqueler, 284).

  ** In June 1835 a force of volunteers called the British Auxiliary Legion, commanded by Sir George de Lacy Evans, had been raised to assist Isabella II of Spain in the First Carlist War. It was reasonable for Campbell to assume that it might grow into a broader conflict involving the regular army and the 98th.

  *** Campbell’s colleague Seward was now a major in the 9th Foot.

  * When it seemed Napier might be appointed an honorary colonel, giving him an extra income, he wrote, ‘I am much too poor to be indifferent about a regiment’ (Shadwell, I, 95).

  ** The Corn Laws banned the importation of foreign cereals unless the price of corn reached 80 shillings per quarter (480lb). From their introduction in 1815 to their repeal in 1846, the price never got that high, and so the law feather-bedded the agricultural sector, insulated British farmers from foreign competition and kept the price of bread artificially high.

  *** Wages on average had suffered since the end of the Napoleonic Wars (Neal, II, 388), although specialist industrial workers had done rather well.

  * An iron cross of four or six spikes used to bring down cavalry.

  ** Local historian William Brockie puts the number at closer to 8,000.

  *** In early 1838 it had been reduced by 25 per cent.

  **** Napier wrote of magistrates, ‘I don’t give sixpence for their opinion; nine out of ten are not worth a straw’ (Shadwell, I, 99).

  ***** Napier’s ‘opinion is to me almost like the Creed’, Campbell later wrote (Shadwel
l, I, 309).

  ****** It demonstrates the social change in Britain that by 1840 a pamphleteer cited flogging as evidence of barbarism, while in 1800 it had been the norm in army, society and the home.

  * Open ground near the river, long since developed.

  ** To be exact, a motion in the house to set up a committee to consider the petition was heavily defeated, leaving the petition dead in the water.

  * The Northern Liberator put it at 40,000.

  ** The Home Office overruled his rejection of the request from Stockton.

  * Newcastle had done well out of the coal boom, and wages were higher than in the agrarian south.

  ** While in Newcastle, Campbell trained his men to advance firing in line, the tactic Colonel Cameron used so effectively in the 9th Foot during the Peninsular War (Shadwell, I, 102).

  *** Years later, when invited to a ball in Paris by Emperor Napoleon III, Campbell wrote nostalgically, ‘I saw much of the beauty of Paris, but not half so many charming faces as one used to see at the balls in the north of England’ (Shadwell, I, 396).

  1 PRO/WO/25/789/2.

  2 Glover, Wellington’s Army, 79.

  3 PRO/WO/31/385.

  4 PRO/WO/25/789; Shadwell, I, 35, 43.

  5 Leslie, 283.

  6 Newcome, 97.

  7 Shadwell, I, 35–8.

  8 Holmes, 180.

  9 Shadwell, I, 39.

  10 Campbell’s obituary, USM, September 1863.

  11 Spiers, 74.

  12 Nenadic, 77.

  13 Pinckard, I, 15; McGrigor, 410.

  14 Bolingbroke, 129.

  15 Fortescue, XI, 38.

  16 Bruce, 82.

  17 Shadwell, I, 41.

  18 Combermere, I, 349.

  19 Williams, E., Capitalism, 194.

  20 Buchan, 185

  21 Clark, J., 41; Groves, 33.

  22 SOAS/Cheveley, 7.

  23 Pinckard, III, 407.

  24 Waterton, 120.

  25 Fortescue, XI, 22.

  26 Pinckard, II, 349.

  27 Rodway, II, 220.

  28 The Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle, July 1824.

  29 Ragatz, Fall of the Planter Class, 409.

  30 MacDonnell, 229.

  31 Rodway, II, 228; Dalton, 348.

  32 Bryant, 5; Rodway, II, 229.

  33 Da Costa, 217.

  34 PRO/CO318/56/71.

  35 SOAS/Cheveley, 23–4.

  36 Chamberlin, 73.

  37 Rodway, II, 240.

  38 SOAS/Cheveley, 33.

  39 Wallbridge, xvii.

  40 Chamberlin, 66.

  41 Wallbridge, 102.

  42 Rodway, II, 241.

  43 London Missionary Society, 21.

  44 Checkland, 189.

  45 Ragatz, 432; Northcott, 20.

  46 Northcott, 11.

  47 Ragatz, 408.

  48 Bury and Norwich Post, 21 April 1824. See also Royal Cornwall Gazette, 24 April 1824.

  49 Shadwell, I, 42, 115.

  50 Rodway, II, 292; Dalton I, 367.

  51 PP/General Regulations; USM, 1835 III, 6; Mackenzie, G., 161.

  52 PP/Report on System of Purchase, 193.

  53 Shadwell, I, 45.

  54 Fortescue, XI, 10–14.

  55 Myerly, ‘Political Aesthetics’, 49.

  56 Myerly, British Military Spectacle, 17.

  57 Myerly, ‘Political Aesthetics’, 55.

  58 Clark, J., 128, 131.

  59 Strachey, 334.

  60 Cooper, 436.

  61 Somervell, 113.

  62 Briggs 121.

  63 WIG/EHC25/M793/15.

  64 Russell, My Indian Mutiny Diary, 114.

  65 Wakefield, II, 364.

  66 Lewis, II, 110.

  67 Inglis, H., I, 91, 94.

  68 O’Brien, I, 374.

  69 O’Hanrahan, 489, 492.

  70 PP/1st Report on Tithes, Vol. XXI.8; O’Brien, I, 381.

  71 PP/1st Report on Tithes, Vol. XXI.187.

  72 The Comet, 29 May 1831; O’Donoghue, 6, 72.

  73 O’Brien, I, 383.

  74 Broeker, 207.

  75 The Comet, 29 January 1831.

  76 O’Donoghue, 6, 77.

  77 Freeman’s Journal, 24 June 1831.

  78 Russell, My Indian Mutiny Diary, 151.

  79 The Comet, 31 July 1831.

  80 Holmes, 284.

  81 Clark, J., 42.

  82 Broeker, 212.

  83 Shadwell, I, 49.

  84 Shadwell, I, 48.

  85 Stocqueler, 35, 38.

  86 Shadwell, I, 1.

  87 Shadwell, I, 52–7.

  88 Anon., The History of the Times, I, 421.

  89 The Carlyle Letters Online: Jane Carlyle to Jeannie Welsh, 8, 18 April 1843; Jane Carlyle to John Sterling, 16 December 1842 (carlyleletters.dukejournals.org).

  90 David, The Homicidal Earl, 48.

  91 Shadwell, I, 59–66.

  92 Shadwell, I, 235.

  93 Shadwell, I, 67.

  94 PP/Report on System of Purchase, 193.

  95 David, The Homicidal Earl, 183.

  96 Shadwell, I, 71–3.

  97 Napier, P., 183.

  98 Diver, 392.

  99 Napier, C., Remarks, 237–8.

  100 Shadwell, I, 78.

  101 Maehl, ‘Dynamics of Violence’, 102; Rowe, ‘Tyneside Chartism’, 64; Schoyen, 43.

  102 Schoyen, 42; Maehl, ‘Dynamics of Violence’, 108–9.

  103 Mather, 142–5.

  104 Shadwell, I, 108.

  105 Mather, 154.

  106 Gwynn, 5.

  107 Napier, C., Remarks, 42–4.

  108 Shadwell, I, 97.

  109 Napier, C., Remarks, 243–4; Mather, 168–73; Strachan, Wellington’s Legacy, 61.

  110 Claeys, II, 181.

  111 Northern Liberator, 27 July 1839.

  112 Shadwell, I, 83.

  113 Northern Star, 13 July 1839.

  114 Rowe, ‘Tyneside Chartism’, 65.

  115 Northern Star, 13 and 20 July 1839.

  116 Maehl, ‘Chartist Disturbances’, 396.

  117 Shadwell, I, 79.

  118 Shadwell, I, 80–1.

  119 Schoyen, 80–1.

  120 Maehl, ‘Chartist Disturbances’, 400–1.

  121 Newcastle Courant, 26 July 1839.

  122 Maehl, ‘Chartist Disturbances’, 400; Burn, 76.

  123 BL/Add.Ms.54514. 31 July 1839.

  124 Newcastle Courant, 9 August 1839.

  125 Maehl, ‘Dynamics of Violence’, 113.

  126 Maehl, ‘Chartist Disturbances’, 403.

  127 Schoyen, 80.

  128 BL/Add.Ms.54514 31 July 1839.

  129 Hastings, 9.

  130 Maehl, ‘Chartist Disturbances’, 406–8.

  131 BL/Add.Ms.54514 31 July 1839.

  132 Maehl, ‘Chartist Disturbances’, 405–13.

  133 Shadwell, I, 86–7.

  134 Northern Liberator, 21 and 28 September 1839.

  135 Fortescue, XI, 431.

  136 Northern Liberator, 20 July 1839.

  137 Northern Liberator, 2 November 1839.

  138 Northern Star, 27 July 1839; Northern Liberator, 26 and 12 October 1839.

  139 Napier, W.F.P., II, 88.

  140 Shadwell, I, 88, 98.

  141 Shadwell, I, 91.

  142 Gubbins, 411.

  143 Rowe, ‘Some Aspects of Chartism’, 35.

  144 Maehl, ‘Dynamics of Violence’, 118.

  145 Shadwell, I, 100.

  146 Train, II, 78.

  147 BL/Add.Ms.54514 16 June 1841.

  148 Shadwell, I, 99–111.

  149 BL/Add.Ms.54514 14 December 1841.

  4

  Imperialist

  * * *

  ‘It would be the worst thing you could have done for a number of years to go to war with an immense empire like China, and possessing so many resources. You would, doubtless, at first succeed, take what vessels they have, and destroy their trade and cities but you would soon t
each them their own strength. They would be compelled to adopt measures to defend themselves against you. They would consider, and say: “We must try to make ourselves equal to this nation. Why should we suffer a people so far away to do as they please with us? We must build ships, we must put guns in them, we must render ourselves equal to them”’

  Napoleon I

  * * *

  By late 1841 Britain’s war with China was already two years old. Its spur had been the refusal of the Chinese to receive British diplomats on equal terms. Twice the British had sent ambassadors to Pekin to pry open the oyster of Chinese trade but each time King George’s delegate refused to perform the kow-tow* required before the emperor. It was the clash of two empires both convinced of their own sublimity. To the Chinese the British were ‘barbarians’, a prejudice which laced their official correspondence with an insufferable superiority; after all, for the Victorians it was clear that Britain was the sole true civilisation on earth and the Chinese the barbarians.

  What the British wanted from China was tea, but the Chinese showed no desire for the European gee-gaws offered in exchange. The one commodity British merchants found the Chinese liked was opium. To minimise the pollution of China by the barbarian horde and its noisome mores, the emperor restricted British trade to the port of Canton. Through this one gateway dealers like Jardine & Matheson smuggled a tonnage of opium passing belief. The drug poured into China with the tacit approval of officials from both nations, but as the number of addicts reached into the millions, concern grew at the Imperial Court in Pekin, and in 1839 the emperor sent a special commissioner, Lin Tse Hsu, to Canton to stamp out the opium trade for good. On 18 March, Lin issued an edict demanding that all opium be surrendered. ‘There must not be the smallest atom concealed or withheld’,1 he decreed, on pain of death. The British Superintendent of Trade at Canton, Captain Elliot, told the merchants to hand over their opium, adding with casual largesse that the British government would reimburse any losses. For the merchants, compensation was as a good as a sale and they readily agreed.