ENGLAND--1848 TO 1849
From May, 1848, to March, 1849, Napier remained in England. During these
ten months his life might fitly be described as a mixture of honour and
insult--honour from the great mass of his fellow-countrymen, insult at
the hands of the Board of Directors of the East India Company, and from
more than one Minister of the Crown. While the military clubs in London
and corporate bodies throughout England and Ireland were organising
banquets in his honour, the Directors were busily at work depreciating
his fame as a soldier, and endeavouring to deprive him of the
prize-money taken in the Scinde War; and for the same purpose the cause
of the ex-Ameers of Scinde was brought forward and championed by the
very persons who at this moment were defending and endeavouring to
screen the perfidy recently enacted against the Rajah of Sattara in the
interests of the East India Directors.
That Charles Napier resented with exceeding warmth these insults upon
his honour and attacks upon his fortune is not matter of surprise, at
least to those who have watched his career through all its varying
vicissitudes, nor were the times such as would have tended to soothe
into quieter temper a mind easily set aflame by the sight of suffering
and oppression. This summer of 1848 was indeed a painful period. The
shadow of an appalling famine was still passing over Ireland; seven
hundred and fifty thousand peasants had already perished from
starvation, and the ghastly record was being hourly swelled by fresh
victims. From across the Atlantic terrible accounts were arriving of the
horrors of the "coffin ships," wherein the famine-wasted refugees
perished in such numbers and amid such scenes of human suffering that
the records of the old middle passage of the slave-ships from Africa
were paralleled if not surpassed. Nor did the story of suffering end
when the great gate of refuge, the shore of America, was reached, for
the deadly famine fever clung to those who reached the land, and the New
World saw repeated in the pest-houses at Quebec, Montreal, Boston, New
York, the same awful scenes which Defoe had described nearly two hundred
years earlier. Small wonder then if Napier's nature should have flared
out at such a time. "I see that violence and '_putting down_' is the
cry," he writes. "There is but one way of putting down starving men who
take arms--killing them; and one way of hindering them from taking up
arms, viz. feeding them. The first seems to engross the thoughts of all
who wear broadcloth and gorge on turbot, but there seems no great
measure in view for removing suffering," and then comes a reflection
that has a strange interest for us to-day: "Yet God knows what will
happen, for we see great events often turn out the reverse of what human
calculations lead us to expect."
When the summer of 1848 was closing, Napier took a house at Cheltenham
for the winter, glad to escape from "those effusions of fish and
folly," the London dinners. From here he watched as eagerly as though he
had been fifty years younger the progress of events in Northern India,
where already all his forecasts of renewed strife were being rapidly
realised. Mooltan was up, the Sikhs were again in arms, the true nature
of the battles on the Sutlej were made apparent; and those hard-bought
victories which the East India Directors and their allies, ignorant of
every principle of war, had persisted in blazoning to the world as
masterpieces of strategy and tactics, were seen to possess, certainly,
the maximum of soldier's courage, but by no means that of general's
ability. The Punjaub war had in fact to be fought again. Meanwhile the
lesser war between Napier and the Directors went briskly on. The more
decidedly events in the East justified the acts and opinions of Napier,
the more vehement became the secret hostility against him. Secret
warfare formed no part of the Napier tactics, and accordingly we find
him blazing out in open warfare against his sly and circumspect
traducers. Writing in his journal more than a year before this date, he
had foreshadowed for himself the line he would adopt against his
adversaries. "There is a vile conspiracy against me," he wrote, "but I
defy them all, horse, foot, and dragoons. Now, Charles Napier, be calm!
give your enemies no advantage over you by loss of self-control; do
nothing that they want, and everything to annoy them; keep your post
like a rock, till you are ready to go on board for England; and then
with your pen, and your pistols too, if necessary, harass them." Here
was his plan of campaign, sketched out clearly enough, plenty of fire
and steel in it, no concealment. "The Gauls march openly to battle,"
had written a Roman historian eighteen hundred years earlier. When the
Franks crossed the Rhine they came to graft upon the Gaulish nature a
still fairer and franker mode of action. Charles Napier could trace his
pedigree back to frankest Frank, and whether he fought a Frenchman in
Spain, a Beloochee in Scinde, or an East Indian trader in the city of
London, his methods of battle were the same.
Before the year '48 closed, great changes and events had taken place
over Europe. France had shaken off her old man of the mountain, Italy
was giving many premonitory signs of getting rid of the Austrian, that
sinister settlement called the Congress of Vienna was everywhere being
undone. Even in Ireland the ferment of revolution was causing a
spasmodic twitching in that all but lifeless frame, and desperate men,
forgetful of the utter ruin which must await their efforts at revolt,
were about to add the final misery of war to the already deeply-tasted
evils of famine and pestilence.
And now came an episode of the Irish rising which was closely connected
with Charles Napier. In September the leaders of the movement were
brought to trial in Clonmel. Sir William Napier, who for the past six
years had devoted himself to the task of vindicating his brother's
character and actions from the aspersions and assaults of his numerous
enemies, had in 1832 been the recipient of a letter, written by the
private secretary of a Cabinet Minister, of a very strange nature. No
other interpretation could have been justly placed upon this
communication except that it was an attempt to sound the then Colonel
Napier upon the likelihood of his consenting to lead an armed movement
of men from Birmingham to London. Wild though such a project may now
appear, there can be no doubt that at the time of the great Reform Bill
it was by no means looked upon as lying outside the pale of probability.
The news that the Duke of Wellington was about to form an anti-reform
administration was received by the people of England with a deep feeling
of execration, and resistance was openly proposed and advocated. "To run
upon the banks for gold, and to pay no taxes to the State, until reform
was granted," were only the preliminary steps which the Whig leaders
advised the people to adopt; and it was an open secret that Lord John
Russell was prepared to go much further in his scheme of resistance to
law in the struggle which the violent opposition of the Lords was
forcing upon the nation. It was therefore no stretch of Colonel Napier's
imagination to see in the strange letter which he received from the Whig
Minister's private secretary a scarcely veiled invitation to draw his
sword against what was the existing law of the land. Bad though that law
most certainly was, and vehemently though he had opposed it by voice and
pen and labour of mind and body, William Napier was still the last man
in England to pass the boundary which separates moral from physical
antagonism. It is alike the misfortune of thrones and of peoples that
around the former there will ever crowd those selfish and self-seeking
men whose loyalty is only a cover to hide their own greed of power or
possession. These people are the real enemies of kings, for they doubly
darken the view which the monarch gets of his people and that which the
people get of their king. The Napiers had both been near enough to the
Throne to know that it lay a long way beyond the self-seeking crowd
which surrounded it, and their hatred of that crowd and of its politics
did not go an inch beyond the surrounding circle. To draw his sword
against the faction which then stood between the people and their right
of reform must be to advance against the Crown, which this faction had
cunningly contrived to hang as a breastplate upon their bodies. That
fact was sufficient for William Napier, and he not only repudiated the
suggestion with all the strength of his nature, but he warned his
correspondent that if ever the then leaders of reform should become the
dominant faction in the State, and should attempt to play upon the
people the same selfish game of obstruction or to prosecute others for
resorting to similar methods of force, he, William Napier, would not
hesitate to publish to the world the unscrupulous lengths to which those
leaders were now prepared to carry their efforts. The trial of the
leaders of the Irish physical-force party at Clonmel on a charge of high
treason seemed to Sir William to be just the occasion he had threatened
his correspondent with. That he held the letter we have described had
long been an open secret, and it was therefore no wonder that he was
summoned by the counsel conducting the prisoners' defence. Early in
October, 1848, the appearance of this majestic veteran as a witness at
the trial of Mr. Smith O'Brien fluttered the Whig dovecots from one end
of the kingdom to the other. Of course there was the usual howl of
execration from the whole tribe of self-styled loyalists,
office-holders, highly-paid idlers, and others; but nevertheless William
Napier was perfectly true to all the noble traditions of his race and
his life in this action of his in behalf of a man who, though terribly
mistaken in the line he had adopted, had been given only too much excuse
for despairing of remedying the wrongs and miseries of his countrymen by
any method of constitutional action.
It happened that in the same month which witnessed these proceedings in
Clonmel a large public banquet was given to Charles Napier by the
citizens of Dublin, and it was of course impossible that the action
taken by one brother in opposition to the Whig Government should not
have been made an occasion for trying to injure, if not prevent, the
compliment about to be paid to the other brother in Dublin. Nothing
could have been meaner and more ignoble than this attempt to step
between the citizens of Dublin and the old soldier whom they wished to
honour. The attempt failed, as it deserved to fail. The banquet was a
splendid ovation. It was followed by another dinner at Limerick, where
the entire people united to honour the guest of the citizens. During his
stay in the Irish capital Napier visited the Theatre-Royal, and the
whole house rose and gave him an enthusiastic welcome when he appeared
at the front of the box. The heart of the man seemed deeply touched by
these evidences of affection from the Irish people. "If I loved Ireland
before, gratitude makes me love her more now," he writes. "My father and
mother seemed to rise before my eyes to witness the feelings of Dublin
towards me." This was indeed fame. Exactly fifty years earlier he had
left the old city of Limerick to ride off to his life of war and wounds
and wanderings, and through all the long intervening years he had never
forgotten the land or the people of his boyhood. Now he was repaid.
These ringing cheers and looks of welcome were the fittest answer to the
impotent spleen of men in power who had denied him the just recognition
of his labours and his victories. They had showered peerages and
baronetcies upon the heads of the leaders of the incomplete Punjaub
campaign. On the victor of Scinde only the most trifling rewards had
been bestowed, and now the people, always just in their final verdict,
had reversed the award.
Napier went for the last time to Celbridge. How strange it seems to him!
How dwarfed it all is by the mighty battles through which the path of
life has led him! The old scenes are there--the river, with its
overhanging trees; the green fields, the fences, the terrace; the house
where every window and door and wall holds some separate memory; the
blue hill-tops along the southern horizon that used to be leagues
distant, but now look close at hand, as though they had one and all
shrunken in size. And so they have; because in after-life we look at
each scene across many mounds, and a hundred beloved figures and faces
of childhood rise up from the grave to dim our sight with tears.
Back to Cheltenham again to the war against Directors and their
confederates, and to other work too. There are many veterans "wearing
out the thread" in the town, and they love to come to the old hero and
retail their woes to him. No sending out of a shilling to the door by
footman or valet, but a talk over old times, and kind words as well as
money to these old, worn-out stop-bullets. "Poor old fellows," he
writes, "it vexes me to see them so hard run for small comforts, and I
am glad I came here, if it were only for the chats with them of old
fights and hardships. They like this, but complain bitterly that old
officers take no notice of them. When I see these shrivelled old men
with age ploughed deep in their wrinkled old faces like my own, and
remember the deeds they did with the bayonet, I sigh for ancient days
when our bodies were fit for war. I remember these men powerful and
daring in battle, for they are mostly my own soldiers." With Napier
there was no such thing as a "common soldier"; the man who went out and
fought and marched and toiled was a hero--a private soldier hero if you
will, but a hero all the same. The whole gorge of the man rose at the
thought that the men who had bled for England should die in an English
poorhouse; that there were thousands and tens of thousands who rolled in
carriages, and drew dividends, and made long speeches in Parliament, and
ate truffles and turtle, because these wizened old scarecrows had in
days gone by charged home, or stood like stone walls under murderous
storms of grape and musketry, or climbed some slippery breach amid the
mangled bodies of their comrades.
A great victory over his numerous and powerful enemies at home was now
in store for Charles Napier. Suddenly, while they were in the midst of
their cabals and intrigues--pulling the thousand strings of mendacity
which gold has ever at its disposal--the crash of disaster to our arms
in India struck panic into the Directors and the Government. The Khalsa
leader, Sheere Singh, had declared war in the northern Punjaub, and the
Dhurum-Kha-Klosa, or religious war-drum of the Sikhs, was beating from
Peshawur to the Chenaub. The Indian Government affected to treat this
new Punjaub war as a trifling revolt. The price paid in life and
treasure for the war that had ended not three years earlier had been so
heavy, and the rewards given to the victors were so great, that this
striking proof of incompleteness had to be minimised as much as
possible. It was really nothing. Nobody need be alarmed. The
Commander-in-Chief in India, Lord Gough, had ample force at his command
to crush this partial uprising of the remnant of the Khalsa army. So
said and wrote the Directors, and so said and wrote the many echoing
speakers and scribes who enjoyed their patronage. All this went on
during the early winter of 1848. Lord Gough, a brave and distinguished
veteran of that type of soldier whose straight and simple code of honour
made him unfitted to deal with the inherent mendacity of the
Directorate, felt himself obliged to act up to the picture so plausibly
painted by his civil superiors. They said he had sufficient force, and
that the enemy was to be despised. In honour bound he must prove these
statements to be true. The old fire-eater forgot that he was risking his
army and his reputation for men who would be false to him at the
slightest breath of adversity, and would unhesitatingly cast him
overboard if by doing so they could prolong for even an hour their own
truculent power. Gough advanced from an ill-stored base upon the enemy.
After a most unfortunate encounter between our advanced troops and the
Sikhs at Ramnugger, the English general crossed the Chenaub, and engaged
the whole Khalsa army at Chillianwallah, on January 13th, 1849. In this
memorable encounter disaster followed upon error, until night stopped
the fighting. Infantry were moved up in close formation to masked
batteries, no reconnaissance had been carried out, the positions of the
Sikh army had to be found by the lines advancing to storm them, and the
troops were formed up to fight their enemy after a long and fatiguing
day's march when they should have been lying asleep in camp. When
daylight dawned upon this scene of the confused fight of the previous
evening, it was found that the Sikhs had fallen back, but we had lost
above two thousand men, half of whom were Europeans; four guns and six
standards had also been taken from us. British soldiers will fight their
leaders through many scrapes and mistakes, but Chillianwallah had been
too prolific in error to be saved even by heroism. When the news of this
battle reached England, the entire nation cried out with one voice for
Charles Napier at the helm of India, and of all the bitter draughts ever
swallowed by any Honourable Company of Traders assuredly the bitterest
was this forced acceptance as their Commander-in-Chief of the man whom
now for six years they had been assailing in public and in private
throughout the entire English empire. All honest England laughed loud at
their discomfiture. Every real man welcomed with joy the triumph of the
old hero over his treacherous and powerful foes. But a week before the
news of this disaster Napier had been holding his own with difficulty
against the enmity of Ministers, Directors, and the leading organs of
the Press. The most persistent efforts had been made to confiscate his
prize-money and to destroy his military reputation. Only a month earlier
he had written to his brother, "I have always an idea of what you
expect, viz. the Directors trumping up some accusation against me, but
they can do nothing, because I have done nothing wrong." With all his
knowledge of character he was still ignorant of the limits to which the
hatred of a corporate body can extend. When Charles Napier was sent for
by the Duke of Wellington, and offered, by order of the Queen, the
command in India, that laconic but celebrated conversation took place.
"If you don't go, I must," had said the Duke. There could only be one
answer to this, and when next day the Press announced that Napier was to
proceed at once to India as Commander-in-Chief, the whole voice of
England ratified the appointment.
But the most striking moment of triumph had still to come. It was usual
for the Directors of the Company to give a banquet to the man who was
about to leave England to command the royal and the native armies.
Napier accepted the invitation. The hatchet was to be buried. Salt was
to be eaten. The old Duke was present. Some of the Ministers were there,
but others were noticeable by their absence. It was a moment when a
smaller mind than Napier's might easily have allowed itself the
exultation of victory, but the old soldier spoke without trace of
triumph. "I go to India," he said, "at the command of Her Majesty, by
the recommendation of the Duke of Wellington, and I believe I go also
with the approbation of my countrymen;" and then, without deigning to
speak of the past and its contrast with the moment, he quietly observed,
"Least said is soonest mended," thanked his hosts for their hospitality,
and sat down.
Then there came a short and busy interval, in which what is called "the
world" ran mad after the hero, not, indeed, because any more of a hero
than he had been a month or a year or twenty years before, but simply
because "the world" thought he could do it a good turn in the matter of
its brothers and sons and nephews. The redoubtable "Dowb" had to be
"taken care of" all along the line, and who can take care of him better
than a Commander-in-Chief in India? One little item from that time
should not be forgotten by those who want to know what manner of man
this Charles Napier was. Just before starting for the East a sudden
command reached him summoning him to dine at Osborne. He has no Court
dress. There is a yellow or drab waistcoat, however, of old-world
fashion and finery upon which he has set store for years. What could be
nicer than this garment? They tell him that it is somewhat out of
date--that it is too high in the collar or too long in the body; in
fact, that it won't do. What is to be done? Only this. He has a
valet--Nicholas by name, Frenchman and dandy--and this valet has a very
fine waistcoat. So the waistcoat of Nicholas is produced, and off to the
Isle of Wight goes the Commander-in-Chief to kiss the hand of the
sovereign he has served so well. No man is a hero to his valet, says the
proverb. We cannot say what Nicholas thought of his master; but this we
can say, that among many soldier hearts throbbing for their Queen, Her
Majesty had none more truly heroic than the old one that beat that day
beneath the valet's waistcoat.