OUT OF HARNESS
Charles Napier in 1830 was to all human eyes a ruined man. He was close
upon the fiftieth year of his age. He was miserably poor; he had a sick
wife and two young children to maintain. "Worse than all," he writes, "I
have no home, and my purse is nearly empty; verily all this furnishes
food for thought." And bitter food it must have been. He was out of
employment and under a cloud, for authority, often ready to justify its
own injustice, was eager to use its powerful batteries of unofficial
condemnation, to hint its doubts and hesitate its dislikes, and find
reason for former neglect in this new proof of "temper neutralising
brilliant qualities," or of "insubordination rendering promotion
impossible." No employment, no home, no money, life's prime gone; toil,
service, wounds, disease, all fruitless; and worse than all to such a
nature, the tactless sympathy of the ordinary friend, and the
scarce-veiled joy of the ordinary acquaintance--for the military
profession is perhaps of necessity the one in which the weed of jealousy
grows quickest, and nowhere else does the "down" of one man mean so
thoroughly the "up" of another. When the shell takes the head off "poor
Brown" it does not carry away his shoes, and Jones is somewhere near to
step into them.
Failure at fifty is terrible. The sand in the hour-glass of life is
crumbling very fast away; the old friends of childhood are gone; a
younger generation press us from behind; the next turn of the road may
bring us in sight of the end. We have seen in the preceding chapters the
extraordinary energy of Charles Napier in action. We shall now follow
his life for ten years through absolute non-employment, and our
admiration will grow when we find him still bearing himself bravely in
the night of neglect, still studying the great problems of life, still
keeping open heart to all generous sympathies, and never permitting the
"slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" to drive him into the regions
of apathy, callousness, or despair.
In the year 1830 England was in a strange state. The reform which
sanguine men had looked for as close at hand fifteen years earlier had
not yet come, but many things had come that had not been expected.
France had shaken off the Bourbons; Belgium had shaken off the Dutch;
the people had in fact righted themselves. The example was contagious.
Throughout the length and breadth of England there arose an ominous
murmur of discontent. It was clear that the limit of patience was being
quickly reached, and if Parliament would not reform itself it ran a fair
chance of being reformed in spite of itself. The accession of William
the Fourth, the manifestation of the supremacy of popular will on the
Continent, and the increasing pressure given by depression in
manufacture and agriculture, all joined to produce a general conviction
that the moment had arrived when reform could no longer be delayed. What
then must have been the dismay and indignation of all men who were not
blinded by faction to the true interests of England when in November,
1830, Wellington delivered in the House of Lords his famous anti-reform
speech, telling the astonished country that the existing representative
system possessed the full and entire confidence of the country, that any
improvement on it was impossible, and that "so long as he held any
station in the Government of the country he should always feel it his
duty to resist any measure of parliamentary reform." This speech was
read as a declaration of war. A fortnight after its delivery the Duke
resigned office, the Whigs came in, but they sought rather to fence with
the question than to solve it. The excitement became more intense, the
country was literally as well as figuratively in a blaze. In the north
of England incendiary fires burned continuously. In March the first
Reform Bill was brought in by the Whigs; incomplete and emasculated
though it was, to suit the tastes of opponents, it was still thrown out.
Then Brougham, seeing that the hour had come for reform or revolution,
stepped to the front, forced dissolution upon the reluctant King, and
the great election of 1831 followed. The new House of Commons passed the
Bill; the Lords threw it out. Popular rage rose higher than ever. There
is one way to save the State. Let the King create new peers, and
out-vote this obstinate faction in the Lords which is bent on resisting
the will of the people. The King would not take this step, and the tide
rose still higher. Bristol was burnt. The funds were down to
seventy-nine. The windows of Apsley House were broken. The Duke of
Newcastle's castle at Nottingham was destroyed by the mob. Indignation
meetings were everywhere convened to protest against the action of the
Lords. An enormous meeting of one hundred and fifty thousand persons
assembled in Birmingham, and unanimously resolved not to pay taxes until
the Bill was passed. The winter of 1831-32 was spent in fruitless
debates. "There is no hope but in violence; no chance of escaping a
revolution," writes William Napier. In May, 1832, Lord Grey resigned
because the King would not create new peers. Wellington was sent for by
the King; for a fortnight he endeavoured to frame an anti-reform
ministry, and then it was that popular indignation broke through all
bounds and carried everything before it. The King had to come from
Windsor to London, and from Hounslow to Buckingham Palace one long shout
of discontent greeted the royal carriage. "No taxes until Reform"; "Go
for gold and stop the Duke," were the cries that met Wellington when he
drove to meet His Majesty at the Palace. A few days later he was mobbed
and pelted with all kinds of missiles as he rode through the city. To
make the insult more ominous it was the anniversary of Waterloo. Then
the King gave way. Brougham and Grey came back to office, the Lords
surrendered, and the Reform Bill became law.
It was into this seething state of politics that Charles Napier came
back from the Ionian Isles. During the three years following his
retirement from active employment, the pressure from straitened means,
and the sense of injustice under which he laboured, kept him much to
himself. The terrible epidemic of cholera which swept England in 1832
very nearly made him one of its victims. Scarcely had he recovered from
this fell disease than he was struck down by a terrible blow. In the
summer of 1833 his wife died. Then at last the great heart of the man
seemed to break. A leaf from his written thoughts at this time attests
the agony he endured. "O God, merciful, inscrutable Being," he writes,
"give me power to bear this Thy behest! Hitherto I had life and light,
but now all is a dream, and I am in darkness, the darkness of death, the
loneliness of the desert. I see life and movement and affection around
me, but I am as marble. O God, defend me, for the spirit of evil has
struck a terrible blow. I too, can die; but thus my own deed may give
the dreadful spirit power over me, and I may in my haste to join my
adored Elizabeth divide myself for ever from her. My head seems to
burst. Oh, mercy, mercy! for this seems past endurance." What depths of
agony these heroic natures know, as profound as the heights they climb
to are immense! He arose from this sorrow chastened, but at the same
time steeled to greater suffering. He hears that his enemies in London
and Corfu are about to attack him in the Reviews. "I will assail in
turn," he writes. "I am so cool, so out of the power of being ruffled by
danger, that my fighting will be hard. The fear of being taken from my
wife to a gaol made me somewhat fearful, when I wrote before, now I defy
prosecution and every other kind of contest." In the end of 1833 he
settled at Caen in Normandy. His life now was very dreary, and his
letters show how small are the sorrows of disappointed ambition
compared with the blows which death deals to all. "Formerly," he writes,
"when looking down from Portsdown Hill on Broomfield, which contained my
wife and children, how great was my gratitude to God! My heart was on
its knees if my body was not." Six months after his loss he writes: "I
am well aware my fate might be much worse, but all my energy cannot
destroy memory. This morning my eyes fell on the account of Napoleon
bursting into tears when meeting the doctor who had attended Josephine
at her death--what he felt at that moment I feel hourly, yet I am
cheerful with others. My grief breaks out when alone--at no other time
do I let it have its way; but when tears are too much checked, comes a
terrible feel [_sic_] on the top of the head, which though not real pain
distracts me, and my lowness then seems past endurance." Then he turns
to the education of his two daughters, and lays down rules for their
training, the foundation of all to be "religion, for to this I trust for
steadiness." So the time passes. He remained in France for three years,
and early in 1837 came back to England, taking up his residence in Bath.
During these three years of absence he had been busy with his pen. His
book on _Colonisation_ had been followed by one on _Military Law_, a
work the name of which very inadequately describes its nature, nor had
he been left altogether outside the pale of official recognition, for in
1835 efforts were made to induce him to accept an appointment in
Australia. These efforts were unsuccessful, and perhaps it was best that
they should have failed, for, as in his book on _Colonisation_ he had
openly avowed his intention of guarding the rights of the aborigines,
"and of seeing that the usual Anglo-Saxon method of planting
civilisation by robbery, oppression, murder, and extermination of
natives should not take place under his government," it is more than
doubtful whether even his success in a Colonial Government could have
been possible. It is singular to note in his views of colonisation how
early he understood that Chinese labour could be made available to
rough-hew a new country into shape. As to his general idea of
government, it is summed up in a dozen words--words which should be
nailed over the desk of every Government official from the Prime
Minister to the humblest tide-waiter. "As to government, all discontent
springs from unjust treatment. Idiots talk of agitators; there is but
one in existence, and that is _injustice_. The cure for discontent is to
find out where the shoe pinches and ease it. If you hang an agitator and
leave the injustice, instead of punishing a villain, you murder a
patriot."
But this work was far more than a treatise upon Colonisation. A large
portion of it was devoted to the exposure of the fatal effects
inevitable from the system of large farm-cultivation then, and for so
many years after, in wildest swing. Living in France at the time, he was
able to compare the general level of comfort enjoyed there by the small
proprietor with the misery of the labouring class in England. The
boasted "wealth of England," he scornfully remarks, "is to her vast poor
and pauper classes as the potato and 'pint' of the Irish labourer; the
Irish may point his potato towards the wretched rasher suspended above
the table, the English poor may speak with bated breath of the wealth of
their country, but they are not to get the smallest taste of it."
Clearly he predicts the day when the landed interest shall suffer for
their accumulated sins, and he addresses them in anticipatory language
such as Hannibal spoke in scorn to the Carthaginian Senate when they
wept over the disasters of Carthage. "Ye weep for the loss of your
money, not for the loss of your people. I laugh at your anguish, and my
scorn for you is sorrow for Carthage." A book full of sense, of long and
widely-gathered experience, of keen and trenchant reflection, all aflame
against stupidity, wrongdoing, and official blundering; all abounding
with sympathy for the weak, for the oppressed, for the suffering.
Shortly after his return to England his other book on _Military Law_ was
published. As we have already said, the title was misleading. The work
treated on many subjects besides Military Law, and touched on a thousand
points of military interest. It is in fact an elaborate treatise upon
soldiers, their peculiarities, their virtues, and their shortcomings. He
recalls with pride the fact that it was not at the door of the regular
soldiers the atrocities of 1798 in Ireland could be laid, and remembers
how when Hamilton Rowan's house was searched by the military, a single
silver spoon that was taken was restored to its owner, although, adds
Napier at the time, "I saw the Castle of Dublin filled with the rich and
powerful, many among them daily robbing the silver spoons of the
public." But in this book, as in all his writing, there is one subject
upon which he is never tired. It is the man in the ranks. How intimately
he knew that man, how truly he loved him, all these multiplied pages of
journals, letters, and books tell. He has not the gift of that sublime
and eloquent language in which his brother has made the deeds of the
British soldier in the Peninsular War immortal--that English classic
which, like a stately temple of old, so grand amid the puny efforts of
later architecture, stands out amid modern word-building in a
magnificence of diction that becomes more solemn and stately with the
growth of time; but if this rare gift is wanting in Charles Napier,
every pulse of his own soldier nature beats for the man in the ranks. He
has seen him at all times and in all places. He knows his weakness and
his heroism; he is never tired of labouring for his improvement or his
benefit. The word "soldier" in his eyes obliterates national boundaries
and abolishes the distinctions of creed, colour, or country. He can love
and admire the soldiers who are fighting against him, provided only that
they fight bravely. The French drummer who saved his life at Corunna is
never forgotten. "Have I a right to supporters?" he asks, when he hears
he has been made a Knight of the Bath. "If so, one shall be a French
drummer for poor Guibert's sake." The chief purpose he had in view when
writing on Military Law was the abolition of flogging, at least in peace
time, in the army. "It is odious and unnecessary in peace," he writes.
"Our father was always against it, and he was right. The feeling of the
country is now too strong to bear it longer, and the Horse Guards may as
well give way at once as be forced to do so by Parliament later on."
This was in 1837, but more than forty years had to pass before the "cat"
was done to death.
When the general election took place in 1837 Napier was in Bath, where
politics were running very high. Roebuck contested the seat in the
Radical interest and was beaten. Charles Napier supported him with might
and main, and his comments on the election are curious. "The Tories,
especially the women, are making a run against all the Radical shops.
Can we let a poor devil be ruined by the Tories because he honestly
resisted intimidations and bribery? Nothing can exceed the fury of the
old Tory ladies." Evidently many things in this world are older than
they seem to us to-day.
Napier had reached his fifty-sixth year; for eight years he had been
unemployed. He was now a major-general, but his half-pay was wretchedly
inadequate to his necessities, and he felt that the shadow of age could
not be much longer delayed. Poverty, neglect, old age, obscurity--these
were the requitals of a life as arduous, as brave, as honourable, and as
devoted to duty as any recorded in our military annals. Fired by the
news that he was again to be passed over for some appointment, he made
in this year, 1838, a last appeal for justice. In this letter he reviews
his long service, beginning at Corunna thirty years earlier. He shows
how junior officers who had served under his orders had received rewards
and promotion, and how favours denied to him as "being impossible" had
been given to others whose record of battle and wound had not been equal
to his own. In the end of the letter the fear that is in his heart comes
out. He hopes that "consideration may be shown to his long
services--services which at fifty-six years of age cannot be much longer
available." Still no work for this tireless worker. Then he goes back to
his books, writes a romance called _Harold_, edits De Vigny's _Lights
and Shades of Military Life_, and turning his attention again to
Ireland, publishes an essay addressed to Irish absentees on the state of
Ireland. But now the long night was wearing out. In March, 1839, he
received in Ireland, where he has been living for six months, a summons
from Lord John Russell. He proceeds at once to London, is offered and
accepts the command of the northern district, where the working classes,
justly enraged at having been used by the Whigs to wring reform from
their enemies, and then flung aside and denied all representative power,
were now combining in dangerous numbers to force from the men they had
put in office the several reforms of the Constitution which were grouped
under the title of Charter. Taking from the example of the Whigs the
threat of physical force which that party had not scrupled to use in
their struggle for reform, the Chartists openly avowed their intention
of redressing their wrongs by arms. In offering the command of the north
of England to Napier the Government showed signal judgment, for on all
the important points of the Charter--vote by ballot, manhood suffrage,
and short parliaments--he was himself a Chartist; but he well knew that
of all evils that can visit man that of civil war is the very worst, and
while on the one hand he would tell the governing powers that the tide
of true popular right can only be finally regulated by the floodgates of
concession timely opened, he would equally let destructive demagogues
know that if physical force was to be invoked he, as a soldier, was its
master.