COMMAND OF THE NORTHERN DISTRICT
In the spring of 1839 Napier assumed the command of the north of
England. The first entry in his journal is significant. "Here I am," he
writes on April 4th in Nottingham, "like a bull turned out for a fight
after being kept in a dark stall." He had been in this dark stall for
more than nine years. He had just arrived from London, where he had had
many interviews with Lord John Russell and other governing authorities.
That these glimpses of the source and centre of power had not dazzled
his mind out of its previous opinions another extract from the journal
will show. "Lord John Russell and the Tories are far more to blame than
O'Connor in my opinion. The Whigs and the Tories are the real authors of
these troubles, with their national debt, corn-laws, and new poor-law."
The condition of England at this time was indeed precarious, yet it was
inevitable. The remedy of reform, delayed until the last moment of an
obstinate opposition, had excited hopes in the minds of the masses that
could not be realised. "The poor you will have always with you." As well
might the victim of hopeless disease expect to spring from the bed of
sickness in perfect health and vigour after the first spoonful of his
black draught as the deep-seated poverty of England look for cure in the
black letter of the most radical statute; but there is the difference
between making the best of the bad bargain of life and making the worst
of it, and that is exactly the difference between the men who object to
all change and those who hold that change must ever be the vital
principle of progression.
But although the operation of laws can only be gradual to cure, however
rapid they may be to cause, the great mass of the people of England
looked to immediate relief from their sufferings as the certain result
of the popular triumph of reform. They were doomed to disappointment on
the very threshold of victory. During the last three years of the
protracted struggle the Whigs had invoked the physical aid of the
people, and there can now be little doubt that it was that physical aid
which had finally decided the battle. When Birmingham threatened to
march on London, and when enormous masses of people in the large cities
of the kingdom pledged themselves not to pay taxes until the Reform Bill
was made law, privilege ceased its opposition. But the people had fought
for themselves as well as for the Whigs, and when the victory was gained
they found the Whigs alone had got the spoils. The people were as much
in the cold as ever. The three great anchors of a pure and true
representative system of government--the ballot, manhood suffrage, and
short parliaments--were notoriously absent from the new scheme. It was
only to be a change of masters, and a change that by no means promised
well, for the old Tory landholder with all his faults and his prejudices
was generally a gentleman, always an Englishman, and often a humane
man; but this new mill-lord was often a plutocrat, always a shrewd man
of business, and generally one who reckoned his operatives as
mill-hands, and never troubled himself about their heads or their
hearts. Thus, instead of a sudden realisation of benefit the people
found themselves worse off than ever, lower wages, new and oppressive
poor-laws, no voice in the law-making, and quite at the mercy, wherever
they possessed the limited franchise, of the will of their masters.
Little was it to be wondered at, therefore, that in the seven years
following reform they should have grown more and more discontented, and
that, borrowing from their old Whig leaders the lesson of force so
successfully set by those chiefs, they should have everywhere formed
themselves into an association prepared to pass the bounds of peaceful
agitation in support of their demand for manhood suffrage, the ballot,
and short parliaments. All these principles of Chartism Charles Napier
well knew long before he accepted the northern command, but of the
actual starvation and abject misery of the lower orders in the great
manufacturing towns he knew little; and side by side with his military
movements and plans in case of attack we find him from the first equally
busy in the study of the state of the people, and equally urgent in his
representations to the Government, that while _he_ would answer for the
order and peace of the moment, _they_ must initiate and carry out the
legislation which would permanently relieve, if it could not cure, this
deep distress and widespread suffering.
It is wonderful to mark in his letters, reports, and journals how
quickly he has mastered the complicated situation which surrounds him.
Three weeks after he has taken command he has the military position
secured. He will have three distinct groups of garrisons, with three
points of concentration, and plans for separate or for united action. He
has all the local magistrates against him, because they alone think of
their individual towns, villages, or private houses, and they want
troops scattered broadcast over the country. The Bradford Justice of the
Peace would willingly see Manchester, Leeds, and Newcastle given to the
flames provided his own city had a soldier billeted in every attic; then
a great local potentate would suddenly rush off to London and threaten
the Home Office with terrible dangers if his particular park had not the
three arms surrounding it. Notwithstanding all difficulties Napier works
away, gets the troops into strategical positions, and, though he hates
the work, throws all his energies into it. Here we have his plans and
his opinions four weeks after he has taken command.
My men should be in three masses, one around Manchester, one around
Newcastle to watch the colliers, one around Leeds and Hull to watch
the other two; but such an arrangement of my force can only be
effected in time. It would take a month to make the Secretary of
State understand it, and then he would have a host of magistrates
on his back. He behaves, however, very well, and stands by me
against the magistrates, so that I have my own way in some degree.
Were it allowed me in all things the country would soon be quieted.
Poor fellows! they only want fair play and they would then be quiet
enough, but they are harassed by taxes until they can bear it no
longer. We could manage a large force of Chartists; but I trust in
God nothing so horrible will happen. Would that I had gone to
Australia, and thus been saved this work, produced by Tory
injustice and Whig imbecility! The doctrine of slowly reforming
while men are famishing is of all silly things the most
silly--starving men cannot wait; and that the people of England
have been and are ill-treated and ill-governed is my fixed opinion.
The worship of mammon renders the minds of men base, their bodies
feeble, and their morals bad. Manufactures debase man, woman, and
child.
All through the summer of 1839 this work goes on. On May 25th a great
meeting took place on Kersall Moor near Manchester. It passed over
quietly. Napier had concentrated two thousand men and four guns in the
vicinity, and he had further taken the original precaution of getting an
introduction to a meeting of Chartist leaders, and telling them plainly
that if they meant only to lay their grievances before Parliament they
would have no opposition from him, and that neither soldier nor
policeman would be allowed to disturb them, but that if there was the
least disturbance of the peace he would use the force he had to quell
it. Another step he took too in this same direction of prevention which
should not be lost sight of. He had heard that the Chartists were very
confident that their possession of five or six brass cannon was of
immense importance to them, and that when the day of action would arrive
these guns would give them victory. He at once secretly invites a
leading Chartist chief to visit with him the artillery-barrack while the
gunners are at work. The battery is drawn up, the command is given to
dismount the guns, remount them and come into action. It is done in the
usual brilliant and rapid manner, and the Chartist chief goes away from
the parade not quite so confident that the five old brass carronades
which are hidden away under some backyard rubbish will be equal to meet
in action these perfectly served guns.
I have read many things in the life of this soldier, but nothing that
does greater honour to him than this desire to use every means in his
power to prevent the effusion of civil blood. There is in almost every
military mind a pride of arms that tends to prevent a soldier taking any
step with his enemies which might even remotely seem to be an avoidance
of strife; but in this instance, when civil war is trembling in the
balance, when the magistrates and many of the Government officials are
calling out for vigorous measures, when Whigs and Tories are jointly
agreed that stern repression is to be the rule of politics, we find the
real soldier anxious only to avoid spilling the blood of his countrymen,
ready to forget his own pride of arms, and to show the leaders of this
multitude how useless must be their attempt to right their wrongs by
force of arms.
In all this anxious time we find the mind of the man as keen to catch
absurdities and note defects of system, military or civil, as it was in
the past. Here is a bit of criticism, good to-day as when it was written
fifty years ago. "I cannot conceive," he writes to an artillery officer,
"how my account of barrack accommodation differs from yours. But this
and other difficulties and irregularities proceed from the monstrous
absurdity of giving the army half a dozen heads instead of one. The
Ordnance alter your barracks, yet I know nothing of it, because we
belong to separate armies--one under the Master-General of the Ordnance,
the other under the Master-General of the Cavalry and Infantry. Then
comes a third, the Master-General of Finance. Last, not least, the
Master-General of the Home Office, more potent than all. Besides these,
you and I have our little masters-general, the magistrates. God help the
poor English army among so many cooks. Were it broth it would have been
spoiled long ago." Just fourteen years later the Masters-General and
their armies of conflicting clerks were to prove themselves more
formidable destroyers of the English army in the Crimea than all the
generals and soldiers of the Russian Czar.
The danger being for the moment past, Napier has time to run round his
garrisons, and then up to London for twenty-four hours to be invested by
the Queen with the Ribbon of the Bath. For many years he has not mixed
with or seen his old comrades of Peninsular days; now he meets them at
the Palace--alas! "worn, meagre, gray-headed, stooping old men, sinking
fast! When we had last been together we were young, active, full of high
spirits--dark or auburn locks. Now all are changed, all are parents, all
full of cares. Well, the world is chained hand to hand, for there were
also young soldiers there, just fledged, meet companions for their young
Queen. They too will grow old, but will they have the memory of battles
when like us they hurry towards the grave?" Fifty years have gone by,
and Time has answered the last query. The fledglings of that day are now
white and bent and broken, and when their old eyes gaze into the winter
firelight, the Alma's height, the long valley of Balaklava, the slope of
Inkermann, or the snow-clad mounds of the great siege rise before them,
even as Corunna and Busaco and Fuentes d'Onoro and the breach at Badajos
came back to the older veterans.
The picture given in Napier's journal is one that would have been worth
painting, so full of contrast was it, so deep-set in history. "There was
our pretty young Queen receiving our homage, and our old shrivelled
bodies and gray heads were bowed before her throne, intimating our
resolution to stand by it as we had stood when it was less amiably
filled. I wonder what she thought of us old soldiers! We must have
appeared to her like wild beasts. Lord Hill is old and has lost his
teeth, poor Sir John Jones looked like a ghost, and Sir Alexander
Dickson is evidently breaking. Thinking how these men had directed the
British thunders of war I saw that death was the master. The brilliance
of the Court vanished, and the grim spectre stared me in the face. His
empire is creeping over all!"
During the summer of 1839 the Chartist agitation went on, and more than
once England was on the verge of actual rebellion. Napier's position was
a very peculiar one. Thoroughly in sympathy with the people in the
objects they had in view, but sternly opposed to any attempt to obtain
these objects by force, he ran the danger of falling between the two
stools of opinion and duty. He was at this time sailing upon a very
dangerous sea, and a single false movement might have involved England
in bloodshed. In his letters and reports to his civil and military
superiors we find the line ever distinctly drawn between the immediate
repression of disorder, which he can answer for at any moment, and the
permanent remedy for the evil, which must be the work of the Government.
To the military authorities these expressions of opinion on the part of
their subordinate appear utterly unprecedented. Napier has told the
Commander-in-Chief that he can see no way to meet the evils but to
concede to the people their just rights, while the principle of order is
at the same time vigorously upheld. The answer to this is suggestive of
many thoughts. "Lord Hill desires me to point out your observation and
to suggest that you avoid all remarks having allusion to political
questions; and I am to say, without entering into the merits of the
question, that neither he, as Commander-in-Chief, nor you, as the
Major-General commanding the Northern District, can have anything to do
with the matter; it is therefore better that you should confine
yourselves to what is strictly your provinces as military men." And
there is another fact revealed to us in the pages of Napier's
correspondence at this time which must strike the reader of to-day as
strange. It is told in his account of a public dinner to which he was
invited in September, 1839. He had accepted the invitation, thinking it
would not be a party demonstration; but he soon found he was mistaken.
All the great ones of the county were assembled, with the
Lord-Lieutenant in the chair. "Church and State" was the first toast,
and it was received with rapturous approval. Then, in the second place,
came the health of the Queen. "Glasses were filled," writes Napier, "but
not a sound of applause followed. Her Majesty's health was drunk in
significant silence. No man cried 'God bless her' except myself. Then
came 'The Queen Dowager [the widow of William the Fourth] and the rest
of the royal family.' Instantly the room shook with shouts of applause."
"You are in the wrong box, General," whispered Napier's right-hand
neighbour, one of the members for the county. "So it seems, my lord,"
answers the irate soldier; "and the reigning Queen is in it too." How
strangely this episode reads to-day; yet at the time it was common
enough in the ranks of the Tory party. It was only a few years earlier
that a widespread conspiracy was afloat among the men who called
themselves the True Blues of their party to shut out the Princess
Victoria from the throne and substitute the Duke of Cumberland for the
succession. How far this conspiracy extended will not perhaps be fully
known in our day; but in point of absolute loyalty to the person of the
sovereign it is probable that the "rebel" Chartists at the time had a
good deal more of it than had some of the supporters of Church and State
who were so anxious to shoot them down.
Placed thus between the devil of the classes and the deep sea of the
masses it is easy to surmise that Napier had no pleasant berth in this
his first command as a general officer. Frequently we find him
regretting his refusal of the Australian appointment two years earlier,
and picturing to himself a land where men worked in the open air instead
of in collieries or factories, a land where taxes were light and people
were contented, and the grades of life were not marked by terrible
extremes. Here are a few thoughts from his journal, worth in their plain
truth and honest judgment many tons weight of the rubbish which the
political economists of that time and since have poured forth to the
world. "I was mad," he writes in August, 1839, "not to go out as
governor of Australia. I could have founded there a great kingdom, with
a systematic education, annual parliaments, and the abolition of the law
of primogeniture as regards land. I would have so ruled Australia that
the land should never have been thus collected." Then he goes on to the
question of what constitutes the true prosperity of a nation. "Men," he
writes, "are restless and discontented with poverty in manufacturing
places. They have all its sufferings and have not those pleasures which
make people content under it, that is, health, enjoyment of country
life, fresh air, and interest in the seasons and in the various products
of nature. The exhausted, unhealthy manufacturer has no such enjoyment;
he has no resources but gin, gambling, and all kinds of debauchery. The
countryman worships God, the manufacturer worships gold, and thus the
practice of sin united to mammon-worship makes the ruffian. Yet such is
the system which your political economists call the prosperity of the
nation. Hell may be paved with good intentions, but it is assuredly hung
with Manchester cottons." As the year 1839 drew to a close, the
starvation and misery seemed to deepen over the northern command. In
November we read, "The streets of this town [Manchester] are horrible.
The poor starving people go about in twenties and forties begging, but
without the least insolence; and yet some rich villains and some foolish
women choose to say they try to extort charity. It is a lie, an infernal
lie; neither more nor less. Nothing can exceed the good behaviour of
these poor people, except it be their cruel sufferings." Hard as had
been his nine long years of inaction, and welcome as work was to his
brain and hand hungry for toil, Napier loathes the employment which
carries with it the danger of having to take the lives of his
fellow-countrymen. On January 16th, 1840, we find him writing the
following entry in his journal: "Anniversary of the battle of Corunna.
Oh, that I should have outlived that day to be at war with my own
countrymen! Better be dead than live to see a civil war!" In the summer
of 1841 a rumour reaches him that he is soon to be offered an Indian
command. The old fighting spirit kindles at once in his heart. It will
be a pleasant change to the Indus, on the very threshold of the Afghan
country where war is raging, from this northern district, where his
command is "slavery under noodles." "Gladly shall I get away," he
writes, "from this district; for how to deal with violence produced by
starvation, by folly, by villainy, and even by a wish to do right, is a
hard matter. A man is easily reconciled to act against misled people if
he has an honest plan of his own; but if he is only a servant of greater
knaves than those he opposes, and feels he is giving strength to
injustice, he loses the right stimulus to action."