Victoria’s Scottish Lion

by Greenwood, Adrian; Haythornthwaite, Philip;

  Ethnologically the Celtic race is an inferior one, and, attempt to disguise it we may, there is naturally and rationally no getting rid of the great cosmical fact that it is destined to give way – slowly and painfully it may be, but still most certainly – before the higher capabilities of the Anglo-Saxon.196

  By laying claim to a Highland persona, Campbell was labelling himself as an untermensch. It might charm the English petite bourgeoisie but many senior officers would no more have a Highlander command an army than a Donegal fishmonger or a Cherokee chief.

  Campbell tried to have it both ways. While he enjoyed the guise of kilted paladin, he objected if the Scottishness imputed to him was too extreme. Well-born Scotsmen did not speak with Scottish accents. Campbell did. Glasgow, then as now, had one of the least penetrable dialects, far more pronounced than that of the Highlands. When the Morning Chronicle described Campbell thundering at Guardsmen in their tents, ‘Oot on you, ye lazy Guards! Nae wunder ye wur surprised and licked at Inkerman!’ it brought forth a hilariously tetchy rebuttal. Campbell denied adamantly that such words had passed his lips, but his real objection was the accent. ‘The sentence in broad Scotch, imputed to me, bears its own evidence of falsehood; for I do not know how to speak broad Scotch, and I am told I have not even a Scotch accent.’** This from a man who never objected to journalists at the Alma and Balaklava reporting his words in a thick Glaswegian patois. The curious thing about this letter was that Campbell sought to refute every minute detail of the newspaper’s story. ‘The Royal piper was not stationed behind my chair at dinner and her Majesty did not summon me to sit by her side on the sofa’, he insisted, labelling such suggestions ‘idle and impertinent stories’.197 He seemed unable to distinguish between inaccuracies that were damaging and inaccuracies that were irrelevant.

  Far more damaging were the press disclosures in early 1855 that Campbell wasn’t his real name at all. Here was a skeleton he had kept buried for fifty years. The revelation that he had been born Colin MacLiver, and changed his name to Campbell upon joining the army, came as a shock to the public. The concern uppermost was, what did he have to hide? Faced with silence from Campbell, the press supplied its own fanciful explanations.*

  To the rescue came Campbell’s cousin, Peter Stewart MacLiver. Here was a man with the answer. His very surname proved it. Peter explained that when Colin had been offered his commission as an ensign, he had been interviewed by the Duke of York in the presence of his uncle and patron, Major John Campbell. The duke assumed the boy was a Campbell, and so his name was entered as such. His uncle assured Colin it was a good military name and suggested he leave it uncorrected. This version of events has been repeated ever since.

  It is a yarn riddled with problems. It was never corroborated by anyone, certainly not Colin Campbell, and never mentioned prior to the Crimean War. Peter MacLiver was a journalist and later an MP, which for most people would be enough to question his version of events. Practically speaking, it makes no sense. The Duke of York’s military secretary would have been informed of Campbell’s desire for a commission in advance and would have known full well what his name was. Neither the duke nor his secretaries noted down the names of new officers upon meeting them, because they already had them on file. Moreover, the Duke of York did not make a habit of greeting every new ensign, especially during the Napoleonic Wars when the turnover of officers was at its peak. We know Campbell, at the time of his commission, was on the Isle of Wight, from where he travelled straight to Kent and then to Portugal, leaving no opportunity for him to visit the duke at Horse Guards. There is also the little matter of Campbell’s sister, who dropped the name MacLiver in favour of Campbell as well. We can be sure this wasn’t the Duke of York’s mistake.

  The final nail in the coffin of this myth is the letter from General Brownrigg, Colonel of the 9th Foot, to the Duke of York’s military secretary dated 19 May 1808, a week before Campbell was commissioned: ‘I have been applied to by Captain Campbell of the 9th Regt, who is a very deserving officer, to recommend his Relation, Mr Colin Campbell for an Ensigncy.’ No mention of a MacLiver. Clearly Colin adopted his nom de guerre before being gazetted.

  That is not to say it wasn’t a brilliantly crafted myth. Placing the blame on the Duke of York absolved Campbell of any nefarious purpose, and gave him a royal association. The duke was dead so he couldn’t confirm or deny it. It was a clever ploy by a creative journalist to get Campbell out of a hole, and a good story is always more enduring than the truth.

  Peter MacLiver did not stop there. He told all who would listen that Campbell’s grandfather had been a Scottish laird and owner of the estate of Ardnave, on the island of Islay, but had forfeited his lands following his support for the anti-British Young Pretender in 1745. This was solid, Sir Walter Scott stuff. The Victorian public lapped it up: Colin Campbell, the descendant of Scottish gentry, cruelly robbed of his birthright by his grandfather’s ill-advised but romantic support for Bonnie Prince Charlie. Would that it were true. The whole of Islay had been purchased by Daniel Campbell, a wealthy Glasgow merchant, in 1726 for £12,000.

  So why did Colin change his name? That he was illegitimate has been suggested as an explanation, although there is no evidence for it.** There may have been an element of snobbery in choosing Campbell (a lowland name) over MacLiver (a Highland name), and it certainly associated him with a powerful clan, including many senior officers and politicians. It would have made matters easier for Colin’s guardian, his maternal uncle, Major John Campbell. There is no record of the major having children, so perhaps he wanted Colin to adopt his name out of dynastic conceit, but then it seems odd that Colin’s father did not object. Also, it was the Campbell, rather than the MacLiver, side of the family which bore a stigma in so far as Colin’s mother had been the product of a bigamous marriage. Even so, ingratiating himself with his uncle seems the most plausible explanation. As the Bombay Times reported in 1858, ‘the name of Campbell was adopted by Sir Colin to gratify an uncle by the mother’s side, who bore that name and had some influence in the army. That influence procured a commission for Sir Colin and for his brother John.’***

  On 3 October, the cabinet met to consider the question of Simpson’s successor.**** While sharing Victoria’s misgivings, it decided that Codrington was nevertheless the best choice. At the same time, it seconded Prince Albert’s suggestion to split the army into two corps d’armée and give Campbell one of them.198 To soften the blow, Panmure recommended that Campbell’s agreement to serve under Codrington be sought by letter before the new commander was imposed. ‘Sir C. Campbell, an officer of high reputation and merit, who, though not judged fit to command the Army, must have every respect showed to his feelings, and ought not to be passed over by a telegraphic appointment’, Panmure advised the queen.199

  The very next day a leader article in The Times plunged in the knife:

  A single year of warfare has disposed of the whole of those veterans, with the exception of Sir Colin Campbell, who has been laid up in lavender all the winter with his Highlanders, and whose military talents, if we may judge of them by his exploits in the Punjaub, do not entitle him to aspire to a great command. We have seen the result of sending a young army into the field almost entirely led by old chiefs, who owed their rank to seniority and brevet promotion; the best of them have either fallen in battle or sunk under disease, and those who remain are mere obstructions to the real strength of the army.

  In response, Campbell released his bulldog. In a letter to the editor, Sterling pilloried a polemic ‘which does not do justice to the good services and well-won claims of one of the most distinguished and deserving officers in Her Majesty’s army’. ‘I trust that even the back of an anonymous scribbler can feel the smart of Colonel Sterling’s merited castigation’, wrote one observer.200 The Times realised it had overstepped the mark in condemning a public hero, and apologised. ‘On the whole I don’t think that Sterling’s letter is thought much of here’, remarked one officer in Sebastopo
l. ‘Sir Colin’s reputation as a soldier is much too high to require his Adjutant-General’s writing about it.’201

  Sterling’s protestations were futile and the newspaper debate academic. The issue of command had already been settled. On 22 October, Panmure told Simpson, ‘You may send for Codrington and consult as to when you will give him over the command, but don’t tell him or any one else that you held a commission appointing him to command in event of your removal suddenly. Send me that commission in the next bag.’ But before Codrington had a chance to gather up the reins, Campbell requested permission to hand the Highland Division over to Brigadier-General Cameron, and return home. ‘The old Highlander has smelt a rat and determined to be off before any change takes place’, Panmure warned Simpson. Having by now let his goatee grow into a considerable grey beard, giving him a hint of Lear on the heath, Campbell boarded the steamer Calcutta on 3 November. Three days later, the despatch announcing Codrington’s promotion arrived, accompanied by the letter from Panmure requesting Campbell stay and serve under the new commander-in-chief. It was too late. Campbell had already left. Codrington seemed pleased with the turn of events. As he told Panmure, ‘Sir Colin Campbell having left the Army removes what I think would have been an impossibility on his part – serving under me.’202

  Codrington’s appointment proved just as controversial as Simpson’s. For Russell he was ‘the last to arise out of the debris of old-fogeyism, red-tapery, staffery, Horse Guardism, etc’.203 Sir George Brown complained that he ‘had no claim whatever to such a preference and distinction, either on the score of previous service or of professional acquirement’.204 ‘So Codrington is appointed Commander-in-Chief!’ declared Paget. ‘What an ill-used man is old Colin Campbell! If you were to canvass the whole army, I believe it would be unanimous for him.’205 ‘It seems rather absurd to have passed him over for the Chief Command and then to make him the hero of the war’, added Colonel Pakenham.206

  The official story was that Campbell was returning on ‘urgent private affairs’. By leaving before Codrington’s promotion was made public, he sidestepped accusations that his departure was due to professional jealousy. ‘The gallant general could not have given up his command in consequence of dissatisfaction with an arrangement of which he could have had no knowledge’, asserted the York Herald,207 in blissful ignorance. The Morning Post confirmed that his leave was just that, leave, and he would return soon.208 Not everyone was taken in. ‘We know that when Sir Colin Campbell returned to England, he had not the remotest intention of going back to the Crimea’,209 claimed Reynolds’s Newspaper. One colonel asserted that Campbell ‘has gone home in consequence of his having lost his temper and used violent language at a Council of War’.210 A letter to the Daily News, dated 9 November, was unequivocal that foul play lay behind it:

  The public understand the whole matter. There is a low-minded jealousy of our one man, which is at this crisis of our history and our danger a crime … Go into any cottage, and ask ‘Who, think you, had earned most credit in the war, so far as the English are concerned? The ready reply will be the same. But sir, Sir Colin had a fault: a grievous one … He is one of those poor, crotchety, simple-hearted people who are fools enough to think that duty is the star which should guide a soldier in his career and that it is a dishonour to a noble and generous profession to compromise with abuses and to pander to a corrupt and effete aristocracy.

  After the rest of the press scrambled to mourn his departure, even The Times, having previously condemned him as deadweight, praised his ‘gallant conduct in action, his vigilance, his carelessness of fatigue and exposure’ as ‘an example we can ill afford to miss’.211 ‘It is a pity they did not find that out sooner’, wrote Sterling.212

  Campbell arrived in London on 17 November. One of his first acts was to visit Panmure, who showed him a copy of the letter sent to Balaklava asking him to serve under Codrington.213 ‘He seemed then to be in very good tone, and though I asked him no questions, he appeared to me to be not indisposed to resume his duties as commander of one of your Corps d’armée’, Panmure advised Codrington two days later.214 Campbell’s recollection was rather different. Unmoved by the ‘utter want of value, in my eyes, of the flummery contained in the letter of the Minister of War’, and still riled that Panmure had ‘proposed me to go from duty with a division in the field to become a schoolmaster to the recruits in Malta’, he had not deigned to answer, and instead headed over to Lord Hardinge to explain that he had returned in order to offer his resignation in person. ‘I do not return in pique at being passed over,’ he told Hardinge, ‘for had the Queen appointed a corporal to command the Army and intimated to me her desire that my services should be continued, I would never have come away.’ Those words were to become a hostage to fortune.

  Hardinge tried his best to persuade Campbell to reconsider serving under Codrington, citing as precedent the Battle of Ferozeshah during the First Sikh War, when Hardinge, though governor-general, had served under his own commander-in-chief, Hugh Gough. ‘I looked him straight in the face’, recalled Campbell, ‘and said to him “My lord, the army in India knew, and every officer and soldier in the whole army knew, that your lordship took that step to save the army, and that your lordship did save the army in consequence. The cases are not parallel.”’215 Campbell was immoveable, but Hardinge was sufficiently sensitive to his social ambitions to realise where a solution might lie.

  The next day Campbell travelled to Windsor for an audience with the queen and Consort. Panmure had advised Victoria that should ‘Your Majesty, in conversation with Sir Colin Campbell, be graciously pleased to intimate that it would afford satisfaction to Your Majesty were he to return to assume command of the 1st Corps d’Armée, your Majesty would establish the authority of your Royal Warrant and save a fine old soldier from lapsing into a retired grumbler’.216 Aged 36, Victoria was that odd mixture of autarchy and girlish silliness, half Boudicea, half Violet Elizabeth. ‘War is indeed awful … I never regretted more than I have done these last few months that I was a poor woman and not a man!’217 she had told the Duke of Cambridge after the Battle of Inkerman, bosom presumably heaving with emotion under imaginary Elizabethan armour. Whether it was because Campbell found it difficult to refuse such a woman, or because he still held that a soldier’s first loyalty was to the monarch rather than government, or because like all renegades, he wanted acceptance from those who had rejected him on his own terms, when the queen pressed him to return to the Crimea, he assured her that he would serve ‘under a corporal’ if she so desired. ‘Conduct like this is very gratifying and will add to Sir Colin Campbell’s high name’, Her Majesty told Hardinge.218 ‘We were much pleased with Sir Colin, & struck by his strong sense of duty, & discipline, still regretting that he is not the Commander-in-Chief out there; his hasty temper, coupled, as it is with the warmest kindest heart, would be very essential’, she wrote. ‘Our misfortune hitherto has been that all our Commanders-in-Chief have been too soft & easy tempered.’219 ‘They first put the Court favourites at the top, and then employ the queen to make the good officers serve under them; it is a shame of the first water’, protested Sterling.220 ‘I doubt the expediency of having asked the queen to request Campbell to go back,’ observed Palmerston. ‘Sovereigns are best kept out of such matters.’221

  Sulk over, in late January Campbell set off again for the Crimea, arriving on St Valentine’s Day ‘looking very fresh’.222 His men had come through the winter in good heart. As so often in British wars, the high watermark of supplies came after the conflict had been decided. By late 1855 rations were plentiful and varied, and the Highlanders had enough huts to make an officers’ mess and a theatre.* Balaklava harbour stood as ‘a monument of British power, energy, and wealth’223 with a proper road connecting it to Sebastopol. Food, shelter and medical aid were in abundance and the troops had benefited from a much milder winter than the previous year. ‘We have remained close to our resources of every kind during the winter,’ Campbell told Co
lonel Henry Eyre, ‘and the result has been that our men have improved in discipline while their health has been admirable during the whole period.’224 While the army had lost 15,013 men to disease between September 1854 and June 1855, only 1,863 fell victim between July 1855 and June 1856.225 ‘No one would have taken the smart, healthy, clean troops on the plateau of Sebastopol in January 1856, to have been the same race and nation as the careworn, overworked, and sickly soldiers guarding the trenches in January 1855,’ wrote Raglan’s nephew.226

  Panmure had instructed Codrington to split the 127,000 men at his command into two corps (one for Campbell and one for Sir William Eyre) but on landing, Campbell found this was still just an organisational theory.** ‘I was rather surprised to find on my arrival here that not only no arrangements had been made for forming a Corps, but that you were disposed to let me remain present without any ostensible position’, he complained to Codrington.227 Sterling suspected deliberate inertia.228 Codrington knew that peace talks were well advanced, and in a few days the very notion of a corps d’armée would become an irrelevance. For the time being, Campbell would have to settle for his old division. ‘He met with a hearty welcome from his old Highland brigade,’ recalled Munro, ‘and it was pleasant to see how the veteran chief’s face brightened up at the enthusiastic reception given him.’229

  On 29 February 1856, fifteen days after Campbell’s return, an armistice was agreed.* Though a technical victory for the allies, there were no winners. ‘The war’, wrote Ellenborough, ‘affords a sad retrospect of neglected opportunities and disappointed hopes. It commenced in ministerial braggadocio and it ends in national mortification.’230 To lighten the mood, Campbell held a special divisional Highland Games at Kamara on 26–27 March; a mixture of the usual caber and hammer throwing, plus more frivolous fare such as sack and wheelbarrow races, and competitive bagpiping. News of the formal peace was announced in General Orders on 2 April. Every allied battery joined in a 101-gun salute.