Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
file which includes the original illustration.
See 47887-h.htm or 47887-h.zip:
(https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/47887/pg47887-images.html)
or
(https://www.gutenberg.org/files/47887/47887-h.zip)
Images of the original pages are available through
Internet Archive. See
https://archive.org/details/sircharlesnapier00butluoft
English Men of Action
SIR CHARLES NAPIER
[Illustration: Logo]
[Illustration: SIR CHARLES NAPIER.]
SIR CHARLES NAPIER
by
COLONEL SIR WILLIAM F. BUTLER
London
Macmillan and Co.
And New York
1890
All rights reserved
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
THE HOME AT CELBRIDGE--FIRST COMMISSION 1
CHAPTER II
EARLY SERVICE--THE PENINSULA 14
CHAPTER III
CORUNNA 27
CHAPTER IV
THE PENINSULA IN 1810-11--BERMUDA--AMERICA--ROYAL
MILITARY COLLEGE 46
CHAPTER V
CEPHALONIA 62
CHAPTER VI
OUT OF HARNESS 75
CHAPTER VII
COMMAND OF THE NORTHERN DISTRICT 86
CHAPTER VIII
INDIA--THE WAR IN SCINDE 98
CHAPTER IX
THE BATTLE OF MEANEE 117
CHAPTER X
THE MORROW OF MEANEE--THE ACTION AT DUBBA 136
CHAPTER XI
THE ADMINISTRATION OF SCINDE 152
CHAPTER XII
ENGLAND--1848 TO 1849 175
CHAPTER XIII
COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF IN INDIA 188
CHAPTER XIV
HOME--LAST ILLNESS--DEATH 203
CHAPTER I
THE HOME AT CELBRIDGE--FIRST COMMISSION
Ten miles west of Dublin, on the north bank of the Liffey, stands a
village of a single street, called Celbridge. In times so remote that
their record only survives in a name, some Christian hermit built here
himself a cell for house, church, and tomb; a human settlement took root
around the spot; deer-tracks widened into pathways; pathways broadened
into roads; and at last a bridge spanned the neighbouring stream. The
church and the bridge, two prominent land-marks on the road of
civilisation, jointly named the place, and Kildrohid or "the church by
the bridge" became henceforth a local habitation and a name, twelve
hundred years later to be anglicised into Celbridge. To this village of
Celbridge in the year 1785 came a family which had already made some
stir in the world, and was destined to make more.
Colonel the Hon. George Napier and his wife Lady Sarah Lennox were two
remarkable personages. The one a tall and majestic soldier, probably the
finest specimen of military manhood then in the service of King George
the Third; the other a lady of such beauty, wit, and grace that her
fascination had induced the same King George to offer her all his heart
and half his throne. Fate and politics marred this proposed romantic
royal union, and the lovely Lady Sarah, after a most unhappy first
marriage, became in 1777 the wife of Colonel George Napier, and in the
following dozen years the mother of a large family, in whose veins ran
the blood of a list of knights and kings and nobles sufficient to fill a
peerage all to itself; for on one side the pedigree went back to the
best of the old Scottish cavaliers--to Montrose, and the Napiers of
Merchiston, and the Scotts of Thirlestane; and on the other it touched
Bourbon, Stuart, and Medici, and half a dozen other famous sources. It
would have been strange if from such parents and with such stock the
nest which was built in Celbridge in 1785 did not send forth far-flying
birds.
The house in which the Napiers took up their residence in this year
stood a short distance from the western end of the village. It was a
solid, square building of blue-gray limestone, three-storied and
basemented, with many tall narrow windows in front and rear, and a hall
door that looked north and was approached by arched steps spanning a
wide stone area surrounding the basement; green level fields, with
fences upon which grew trees and large bushes, spread around the house
to north and west, and over the tops of oak and beeches to the south a
long line of blue hills lay upon the horizon. Looking south towards
these hills the eye saw first a terrace and garden, then a roadway
partly screened by trees, and beyond the road the grounds of Marley
Abbey sloping to the Liffey, holding within them still the flower-beds
and laurel hedges amid which Vanessa spent the last sorrow-clouded years
of her life. But to the boys up in the third-story nursery, looking out
in the winter evenings to snowy Kippure or purple Sleve-rhue, the loves
and wrongs of poor Vanessa mattered little. What did matter to them,
however--and mattered so much that through a thousand scenes of future
death and danger they never forgot it--was, that there stood a certain
old larch tree in the corner of the pleasure-ground where the peacocks
fluttered up to roost as the sun went down beyond the westmost Wicklow
hill-top, and that there was a thick clump of Portugal laurels and old
hollies where stares, or starlings as they call them in England, came in
flocks at nightfall, and sundry other trees and clumps in which
blackbirds with very yellow winter beaks flew in the dusk, sounding the
weirdest and wildest cries, and cocked their fan-spread tails when they
lighted on the sward where the holly and arbutus berries lay so thick.
When Colonel Napier settled at Celbridge he was still in his prime, a
man formed both in mind and body to conquer and direct in camp, court,
or council; and yet, for all that, a failure as the world counts its
prizes and blanks in the lottery of life. He had recently returned from
the American War, where he had served with distinction. He had filled
important offices abroad and at home, and by right of intellect and
connection might look forward almost with certainty to high military
command, but he had one fatal bar against success in the career of arms,
as that noble profession was practised in the reign of George the Third
and for a good many years after--he was in political opinion intensely
liberal and intensely outspoken. The phrase "political opinion" is
perhaps misleading. Colonel Napier's liberalism was neither a party cry
nor a prejudice. It sprang from a profound love of justice, an equally
fixed hatred of oppression, and a wide-reaching sympathy with human
suffering that knew no distinction of caste or creed. The selection of
Celbridge as the Napiers' family residence at this period was chiefly
decided by the proximity of the village to the homes of Lady Sarah's two
sisters--the Duchess of Leinster at Carton, and Lady Louisa Conolly at
Castletown--indeed only the length of the village street separated the
beautiful park of Castletown from the Napiers' home, and Castletown
woods and waters were as free to the children's boyish sports and
rambles as its saloons were open to them later on when the quick-running
years of boyhood carried them into larger life. Whatever was beautiful
and brilliant in Irish society--and there was much of both--then met in
the Castletown drawing-rooms. They were to outward seeming pleasant
years, those seventeen hundred and eighties and early nineties in
Ireland. The society that met at Castletown formed a brilliant circle of
orators, soldiers, wits, and statesmen, many of whose names still shine
brightly through the intervening century. Grattan, Curran, Flood,
Charlemont, the Ponsonbys, Parnell, the Matthews, and younger but not
less interesting spirits were in the group too; the ill-fated Lord
Edward Fitzgerald (first cousin to the Napier boys); young Robert
Stewart, still an advanced Liberal,--not yet seeing that his road to
fortune lay behind instead of before him; and there was another
frequent guest at Castletown--a raw-boned, youthful ensign, generally
disliked, much in debt to his Dublin tailor, but nevertheless regarded
by Colonel Napier, at least, as a young man of promise, who, if fate
gave him opportunity, would some day win fame as a soldier--one Ensign
Wellesley, or, as he then wrote his name, Arthur Wesley.
When the Napier coach drove into Celbridge with the newly-arriving
family in 1785, there was in it a very small boy, Charles by name, the
eldest son of the handsome colonel and his beautiful wife--a small,
delicate-looking child, who had been born at the Richmond residence in
Whitehall just three years earlier. Two other children younger than
Charles made up, with the due complement of nurses and boxes, an
imposing cavalcade, and for days after the arrival baggage and
books--these last not the least important items in the family
future--continued to trundle through the village.
Twelve years go by; 1797 has come. Long ago--what an age in childhood
seem these few flying years!--little Charles has made himself at home in
a circle ever widening around the Celbridge nest. He has a fishing-rod,
and the river east and west has been explored each year a longer
distance. He has a pony, and the mountains to the south have given up
their wonders to himself and his four-footed friend. And finally,
grandest step of all in the boy's ladder, he has a gun, and the
wood-pigeons of Castletown and the rabbits out in big fences to the west
know him as one more enemy added to the long list of their foes.
And how about the more generally recognised factors of
boy-training--school and schoolmaster? Well, in these matters we get a
curious picture of army-training in that good old time when George the
Third was King. At the age of twelve little Charlie Napier had been
nominated to a pair of colours in His Majesty's Thirty-Third Regiment of
Foot. War had broken out with France. Mr. Pitt was borrowing some fifty
millions every year, and commissions in Horse, Foot, and Dragoons, in
Hessian and Hanoverian Corps, in Scotch Fencibles and Irish Yeomanry and
English Militia, were plentiful as blackberries in the Celbridge fields.
But though Charles had on many occasions shown himself a little lad of
big heart and steady courage in sundry encounters with fish, flesh, and
fowl, he was still too young to fight a Frenchman; and besides, it was
even then a canon of war that before you are fit to kill an enemy in the
field you must be able to write a nice letter to him, and perchance to
talk to him in his own language, and to draw little lines and tracings
of the various emplacements and scarps and counter-scarps by which you
propose to knock his cities about his ears, and otherwise blow him and
his off the face of the earth. So, instead of proceeding with the Duke
of York's army to Flanders, Charles was sent to Mr. Bagnel's school in
Celbridge village. A very humble and unpretending scholastic institution
was Mr. Bagnel's academy,--not much further removed from the
hedge-school of the time than the single street of Celbridge was distant
from the green hedges around it; and of a very mixed description were
the numerous boys who gathered there to receive from Mr. Bagnel's mind,
and frequently also from his hand, the instruction mental and physical
which he deemed essential for their future guidance. The boys were
chiefly the sons of Dublin merchants or local better-class farmers, and
were, with the exception of the Napiers, all Roman Catholics. That
Charles and his brothers George and William should soon become the
leaders of the school, and the child-champions of its youthful
democracy, was not to be wondered at. They represented to the other boys
the three most taking and entrancing things of boy life--genius,
courage, and strength. All three boys were plucky as eagles, but Charles
was captain by reason of his superior intelligence; George was
lieutenant on account of reckless daring; William was ensign because of
immense strength; and all were beloved because they, the grandsons of a
duke, were ever ready to uphold with the weapons of boyhood the rights
and freedom of their Catholic comrades against the overbearing
usurpations and tyrannies of a large neighbouring seminary, where the
more favoured sons of Protestant ascendancy were being booked and
birched.
At ten o'clock every morning the Napier boys proceeded up the village to
school, and at three they came down the single street for home. Great
was the commotion when this hour of breaking-up arrived; it was the
event of the day for the villagers, and no wonder, for then a strange
sight was often to be seen. There were pigs in Celbridge in these days,
tall gaunt animals with wide flapping ears that hung over their eyes,
and long legs that could gallop over the ground; and it is said that,
mounted on the backs of those lean and agile hogs, the Napier boys were
wont to career homeward with scholars and pig-owners following in wild
pursuit.
"What a terrible training!" I think I hear some worthy parent or
pedagogue exclaim, reading this deplorable incident. And yet it is not
all so clear this matter of boy-training. Would not the guiding lights
of Eton and Harrow and Rugby stand aghast at such companionship, such a
scene as this hog-race down the village? Still, somehow or other, when I
walk round Trafalgar Square or down Waterloo Place, I seem to miss these
great centres of training in the statues of Nelson, Havelock, Franklin,
Clyde, Gordon, Lawrence, Napier; and I see beyond the bronze or the
marble the boy-hero at his village school--one at Foyle, another at
Taunton, a third at Celbridge, a fourth at St. Ives, a fifth at
Swanscombe--until I come to think it is not quite so certain that we
know all about the matter. So too, when my mind turns to the subject of
military teaching, and I compare the course of school-training Charles
and William Napier received at the hands of Mr. Bagnel with our modern
system of competitive cramming, I am forced to the conclusion that both
these brilliant soldiers would have been ignominiously "plucked" for
entrance to Sandhurst or Woolwich; nor does the outside and casual
training which these boys underwent show with less disadvantage beside
our modern system. How a professor of military history, for instance,
would have scorned the tuition in the practice of war conveyed to Ensign
Charles Napier by old Molly Dunne as she sat in her cottage porch of a
summer evening telling the listening boys about her battles and
sieges. She was the Celbridge carpenter's great-grandmother, and of
prodigious age. She could tell her listeners how she had seen the last
real lord of Celbridge ride forth to fight for his king, their own
great-great-great-granduncle, at the Boyne, just one hundred years
earlier, and how she had seen his body brought back to be laid in the
old graveyard of Kildrohid, close to their own gateway. That was a long
look back, but Molly's memory went further off still, for she could tell
of wilder times of war and havoc; of how as a little child she had heard
people speak of the red days at Drogheda and Wexford, when Cromwell
imagined that he had found a final method of dealing with the Irish
question. This wonderful old woman, who had seen more of actual war than
had many of the generals by whose military knowledge and experience Mr.
Pitt just at this moment fondly hoped he was going to stop the French
Revolution, was said to be about one hundred and thirty years of age.
But Charles Napier and his brothers had the benefit of one outside
teacher, the value of whose teaching to them it would not be easy to
exaggerate; out of doors and indoors, on the river and the mountain,
their father was their best school-master. From him Charles Napier
learned a thousand lessons of truth and justice, of honour in arms, of
simplicity in life, of steady purpose, of hatred for pomp and show and
empty-headed pride, of pity for the poor, of sympathy with the
oppressed, of fearless independence of character, which those who care
to follow us through these pages will find growing in profusion along
the pathway of his life, plants none of which ever withered from the
moment they were planted in these youthful days, but many of which were
only to blossom into full luxuriance in the autumn of existence. When
full fifty years have passed by we shall find the lessons sown along the
Liffey, and amid the Wicklow hills, bearing their rich harvest in
distant scenes by the shores of mighty Eastern rivers and under the
shadows of Himalayan mountains. It has been said that the house at
Celbridge held large store of books, and it may be that in the library a
copy of old Massinger was to be found, wherein, if the boys were not
allowed promiscuously to read, they had read to them that wonderful
picture of the real soldier which the dramatist drew so uselessly for
the Cavaliers of his time, so terribly useful for their Roundhead
enemies.
If e'er my son
Follow the war, tell him it is a school
Where all the principles tending to honour
Are taught, if truly follow'd; but for such
As repair thither as a place in which
They do presume they may with license practise
Their lusts and riots, they shall never merit
The noble name of soldiers. To dare boldly
In a fair cause, and for their country's safety
To run upon the cannon's mouth undaunted;
To obey their leaders, and shun mutinies;
To bear with patience the winter's cold
And summer's scorching heat, and not to faint,
When plenty of provision fails, with hunger,
Are the essential parts make up a soldier--
Not swearing, dice, or drinking.
At last the time came for Charles to quit home and go out by himself
into the world. He had been an officer on that wonderful institution
called the Irish Establishment since he was twelve years old, and now he
must join the army; so, in the last year of the century, he takes his
first flight on the Limerick coach, and arriving in that old city is
installed as extra aide-de-camp to the general officer there commanding.
He remains at Limerick for a year, where the usual subaltern officer's
drill is duly passed through. He is very often in love; he rides,
shoots, breaks his leg jumping a ditch, and altogether feels quite sure
that he has thoroughly mastered the military art. Still among these
inevitable incidents of a young soldier's existence we get a glimpse of
the nature of the future man coming out clear and distinct. He and his
brother George are out shooting; a snipe gets up, Charles fires and the
bird drops, but a deep wide ditch intervenes, and in springing across
this obstacle the boy falls and breaks his leg. It is a very bad
fracture, and the bone is sticking out above the boot. His gun (a gift
from his father) has fallen one way, he is lying another. First he draws
himself near enough to recover the weapon, then he crawls on to where
the snipe is lying, and then when his brother George has come up and is
looking deadly pale at the protruding bone, the fallen sportsman cries
cheerily out, "Yes, George, I've broken my leg, but I've got the snipe."
They carry him home on a door, and for two months he is laid up with
this shattered leg; but at eighteen a broken heart or leg is soon set
right, and early in 1800 we find him impatient to be off to wider scenes
of soldiering. He has been run very low by this accident, and his
general--fearful for his aide-de-camp's life--has written to Colonel
Napier, advising leave of absence and rest for the boy. Charles hears of
this letter shortly after, and is highly indignant at his general's
action. "I am sure," he writes to his father, "you will never consent to
do anything of the sort" (to apply to the Commander-in-Chief for leave
of absence), "which you must think, and which you may be certain I
think, would be disgraceful and unbecoming the character of a British
soldier. The general would not have done such a thing for himself, and
could not have considered much when he proposed it for me." Just fifty
years later we shall see the war-worn old veteran taking leave of the
officers of India in words of advice and farewell couched in the same
lofty spirit of military duty which is expressed in this boy's letter.
And now the scene changes.
Early in 1801 Charles Napier mounts his little Irish cob and rides away
from Limerick to begin the career which was to be carried through such
stirring and varied scenes. He rode in a single day from Limerick to
Celbridge, more than one hundred miles, on the same horse. We know
nothing of that long day's ride, save the bare fact of its
accomplishment; but it requires no effort of imagination to picture this
ardent, impetuous boy pushing forward mile by mile, intent upon proving
by the distance he would cover that despite what generals might write or
doctors might say, he _was_ fit for any fatigue or duty; and as the
Irish hill-tops rose before him in fresh horizons we can fancy the
horseman's mind cast far ahead of the most remote distance, fixed upon
some scene of European or Egyptian battle, where the great deeds of war
then startling all men by their splendid novelty were being enacted
before a wondering world. For only a few months prior to the date of
this long ride a great battle had been fought at Marengo in Italy, and
the air was still ringing with its echoes; then had come the news of
Hohenlinden, that terrible midnight struggle in the snow of the Black
Forest. Never had the world witnessed such desperate valour; never had
such marches been made, such daring combinations conceived, such
colossal results achieved. A new world seemed to be opening before the
soldier; and France, victorious for a second time over the vast forces
of the European coalition, appeared to have given birth to conquerors
before whose genius all bygone glory grew pale and doubtful.
And already, amid the constellation of command which the seven years'
aggression of Europe against France had called forth from the great
Revolution, one name shone with surpassing lustre. Beyond the Alps, amid
scenes whose names seemed to concentrate and combine the traditions of
Roman dominion with the most desperate struggles of medieval history,
there had arisen a leader in the first flush of youthful manhood, before
whom courage had been unavailing, discipline had become a reed, numbers
had been brought to ruin, combination had been scattered, the strength
of fortress had been pulled down, until the great empire whose name had
been accepted as the symbol of military power in Europe, and whose
history went back through one thousand years of martial glory, lay
prostrate and vanquished at his feet.