Victoria’s Scottish Lion Read online

  1808

  26 May: Commissioned ensign in 9th Foot, without purchase.

  21 August: Battle of Vimeiro.

  1809

  16 January: Battle of Corunna. Evacuated to Plymouth.

  29 June: Promoted lieutenant, without purchase.

  July–September: Walcheren Expedition.

  December: Posted to Gibraltar.

  1810

  14 April: Posted to garrison at Tarifa.

  15 September: Returns to Gibraltar.

  1811

  5 March: Battle of Barrosa.

  Autumn: Appointed ADC to Spanish General Livesay.

  1812

  3 January: Arrives at very end of Siege of Tarifa.

  1813

  18 June: Action at Osma.

  21 June: Battle of Vitoria.

  17 July: Attack on convent of San Bartolomé.

  25 July: Leads forlorn hope at first assault of San Sebastian. Wounded twice.

  7 October: Passage of the Bidassoa. Wounded again.

  9 November: Promoted captain in 7/60th, without purchase.

  December: Returns to Britain.

  1814

  October: Joins regiment at Halifax, Nova Scotia.

  1815

  July: Returns to Britain.

  Moves to South of France to recuperate.

  1817

  7/60th reduced. Transfers to 5/60th at Gibraltar.

  1818

  July: 5/60th reduced.

  26 November: Campbell exchanges into 21st Royal North British Fusiliers.

  1819

  April: Sails for Caribbean.

  May: Arrives in Barbados.

  1821

  March: Posted to Demerara.

  1823

  17 August: Slave revolt erupts.

  1824

  April: Murray replaced by D’Urban. Campbell remains as ADC.

  1825

  26 November: Promoted major, by purchase.

  1826

  Returns to Britain.

  1827

  January: 21st Fusiliers return from the West Indies and are posted to Windsor.

  1828

  Autumn: Regiment moves to Fermoy, Ireland.

  1830

  May: Regiment moves to Kilkenny.

  Autumn: First stirrings of Tithe War.

  1831

  October: Regiment sails from Dublin to Liverpool.

  1832

  26 October: Gazetted lieutenant-colonel (unattached), by purchase.

  1835

  8 May: Gazetted lieutenant-colonel in the 9th Foot, without purchase.

  19 June: Exchanges into 98th Foot.

  1837

  Summer: 98th arrives in Portsmouth.

  1839

  July: Moves with regiment to Newcastle.

  30 July: ‘Battle of the Forth’.

  1841

  July: Regiment moves to Carlow. Campbell remains in London.

  20 December: Sails with 98th on HMS Belleisle for China.

  1842

  21 July: Storming of Chinkiangfoo.

  29 August: Treaty of Nankin.

  1 November: Returns to Hong Kong.

  December: Appointed Commandant.

  Appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath. Promoted full colonel, without purchase, and aide-de-camp to the queen.

  1844

  January: Promoted brigadier, second class, and appointed Governor of Chusan.

  1846

  July: Chusan handed back to the Chinese. Campbell sails for India with 98th Foot.

  24 October: Reaches Calcutta. Appointed Commandant of Fort William.

  18 December: Marches with 98th to Dinapore.

  1847

  January: Appointed to command garrison at Lahore.

  1848

  April: Revolt at Mooltan.

  November: Promoted brigadier-general.

  22 November: Action at Ramnuggur.

  3 December: Action at Sadoolapore.

  1849

  13 January: Battle of Chillianwala. Wounded twice.

  21 February: Battle of Goojrat.

  April: Appointed to command at Rawal Pindi.

  5 June: Made Knight Commander of the Bath.

  July: Troops at Rawal Pindi refuse pay.

  29 November: Appointed to command at Peshawur.

  1850

  February: Punitive expedition to Kohat.

  1851

  October: Punitive expedition against Momunds.

  1852

  March: Further expeditions against Momunds and Ranizai.

  May–June: More expeditions against Ranizai.

  3 June: Resigns command at Peshawur.

  1853

  March: Reaches England.

  1854

  21 February: Promoted brigadier-general.

  5 April: Leaves by paddle steamer for Turkey.

  20 June: Promoted major-general.

  14 September: Lands in the Crimea.

  20 September: Battle of the Alma.

  25 October: Battle of Balaklava.

  1855

  January: Granted local rank of lieutenant-general.

  10 July: Made Knight Grand Cross of the Bath.

  8 September: Fall of Sebastopol.

  November: Resigns and returns to London.

  December: Granted local rank of full general.

  1856

  14 February: Disembarks in the Crimea.

  30 March: Treaty of Paris signed, ending the war.

  10 May: Embarks for home.

  4 June: Promoted lieutenant-general in the army.

  1857

  26 June: Officiates at first Victoria Cross award ceremony in Hyde Park.

  11 July: Accepts post of commander-in-chief in India.

  13 August: Lands in Calcutta.

  12–17 November: Fights his way into and out of Lucknow. Wounded twice.

  6 December: Battle of Cawnpore and defeat of the Gwalior Contingent.

  1858

  2 January: Wounded by spent ball at Kalee Nuddee.

  6–9 March: Lucknow retaken.

  5 May: Battle of Bareilly.

  14 May: Promoted full general in the army.

  3 August: Ennobled as Baron Clyde of Clydesdale.

  1 November: 4th European Light Cavalry object to change of allegiance.

  26 December: Injured after falling from horse.

  1859

  May: European regiments protest at lack of bounty for transfer of allegiance.

  8 July: Canning declares sepoy revolt over.

  October: Accompanies Canning on tour of India. Mobilises troops for China.

  1860

  4 June: Leaves India.

  25 June: Made Knight Commander of the Star of India.

  1862

  9 November: Promoted field marshal.

  1863

  14 August: Dies at Chatham.

  Prologue

  * * *

  ‘It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather, we should thank God that such men lived’

  General George S. Patton Jr

  * * *

  ‘Few persons connected his name with any thought of age or decline,’ declared the Glasgow Herald, ‘for there had been nothing of either in his public acts. Indeed, although he has passed away in the evening of his years, he is cut short in the noon of his fame and his powers.’1

  Colin Campbell’s had requested a modest burial in Kensal Green Cemetery, a request typical of a frugal general who ‘found it more difficult to encounter the public thanks of his countrymen, than the batteries of the enemy’,2 but both army and government knew that the British public would not let him bow out that quietly. The clamour from the obituary writers for him to be interred in one of the great cathedrals was hard to resist, and so, with the queen’s blessing, the Secretary for War arranged a plot in Westminster Abbey with full honours. The funeral was scheduled for 22 August 1863.

  Even before his death, praise had been effusive. ‘Sir Colin Campbell has, I believe
, only one fault: a courage too reckless for his country’, declared Disraeli. ‘An union of personal valour so eminent, with strategy so prudent, has seldom been presented in the history of great military commanders.’3 When Campbell received an honorary degree from Oxford University, it was in the company of Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Dr David Livingstone. During a visit to his home town of Glasgow, the crowds were larger than any since the queen’s tour of the city seven years before.4 Staffordshire potteries produced figurines of him (see Plate 37), sheet music publishers put him on the covers of Scottish reels and tobacconists used his face to sell cigars. By his death there were more pubs in London named after him than Nelson.

  If in England he was held up as the greatest soldier of his day, in his native Scotland he was elevated to demi-god. ‘One of the greatest generals whom Great Britain ever produced, and second to none in the advantages he has gained for his country’, claimed the Glasgow Herald:

  Wellington did not exceed him in the combination of prudence in danger, with vigour in execution, by which he was distinguished. Like Marlborough he never fought a battle he did not gain, nor sat down before a place he did not take. The saviour of India may well take a place in British history, second only to the conqueror of Napoleon and the humbler of the pride of Louis XIV.5

  Campbell’s achievements seemed all the more admirable given the apparent obscurity of his birth. ‘How great must have been the perseverance, the courage and the discretion of such a friendless and penniless boy to have raised himself to a peerage and to the Colonelcy of the Coldstream Guards, can be known only to those who understand the aristocratic traditions of the British army’, wrote the Daily News. ‘It needed more than forty years of arduous service, a Russian war, and a tottering empire before such a man could obtain promotion or a reasonable reward.’6 ‘If ever there was a peer who won name and nobility by sheer hard work’, wrote William Russell of The Times, ‘it was he.’7 But even as a peer he could still be a boat-rocker. ‘He was too independent to be a courtier; wrapped up only in his country … too single-hearted to be a political partisan’, as the Glasgow Herald diplomatically put it.8

  That independent spirit had been a handicap. ‘To the “authorities” the career of Colin Campbell, Lord Clyde, stands forth as a flagrant scandal’, declared The Morning Post:

  It is to be hoped that it may in future act as a useful warning. Not once in a career of fifty years did official patronage visit with common justice, still less with generosity, merits that were palpable to all besides. The advancement that was tardily and grudgingly meted out to him was even then always a degree in arrears. Such continuous blindness, or such persistent injustice at headquarters was incredible.9

  The Daily News continued in similar vein:

  Though he had contributed much to the victory of the Alma – though he had watched day and night the lines of Balaklava – though he had met the onset of the Russian horse with the famous ‘thin red line’, disdaining to throw his men into square – though he had proved himself the ablest officer who was left with the British army after the death of Lord Raglan, he was destined to be passed over by two men, who, however excellent as men of business, or as copious letter writers, were immeasurably his inferiors.10

  Despite this alleged establishment conspiracy, Campbell ‘came out of the war with [an] untarnished reputation’, reported the Glasgow Herald, ‘and when we had to seek for a General equal to the great necessity of the Indian Mutiny, no voice hesitated to applaud the appointment of Sir Colin Campbell’.11

  On the day of the funeral, crowds lined the streets ‘such as one would have seen on the occasion of a State funeral of the greatest in the land’, reported The Times:

  There were those, no doubt, who were attracted solely by curiosity and by the desire to see a line of carriages and horses but besides, there stood in that people’s guard assembled to do honour to the soldier, many an old moustache who saluted as the hearse bore all that remained of the fiery centurion of the Peninsula and of the conqueror of India.12

  Being late summer, the royal family were in the country, but the carriages of Queen Victoria, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, and the Prince of Wales, all in full mourning drapes, attended as proxies. Fourteen more carriages of mourners followed. Inside were the Duke of Wellington,* a marquess, three earls, one viscount, sundry military top brass and the editor of The Times. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, William Gladstone, sent his son to represent him. The renowned war correspondent, William Russell, who had accompanied Campbell through two campaigns, was despatched to cover the event.

  Once the eulogies had been delivered, the strains of Purcell and Handel had died away and the sub-dean had finished speaking, the coffin was lowered into a vault in the nave, and this matter-of-fact epitaph placed on top:

  Beneath this stone

  Rest the remains of

  Colin Campbell, Lord Clyde,

  Who, by his own deserts,

  Through fifty years of arduous service,

  From the earliest battles in the Peninsular War

  To the Pacification of India in 1858,

  Rose to the rank of Field Marshal and the Peerage.

  He died lamented

  By the Queen, the army, and the people,

  14th August 1863,

  In the 71st year of his age

  The question remains, how much truth lies beneath this tide of hyperbole?

  Notes

  * The 2nd Duke of Wellington, son of Arthur Wellesley, the Iron Duke.

  1 Glasgow Herald, 17 August 1863.

  2 Birmingham Daily Post, 24 August 1863.

  3 Hansard/HC/Deb.8/2/58.Vol. 148, cc. 865–932.

  4 Glasgow Herald, 15 August 1863.

  5 Glasgow Herald, 15 August 1863.

  6 Daily News, 15 August 1863.

  7 The Times, 24 August 1863.

  8 Glasgow Herald, 15 August 1863.

  9 Morning Post, 22 August 1863.

  10 Daily News, 15 August 1863.

  11 Glasgow Herald, 17 August 1863.

  12 The Times, 24 August 1863.

  1

  Witness to War

  * * *

  ‘We must recollect … what we have at stake, what it is we have to contend for. It is for our property, it is for our liberty, it is for our independence, nay for our existence as a nation; it is for our character, it is for our very name as Englishmen; it is for everything dear and valuable to man on this side of the grave’

  William Pitt the Younger, House of Commons, 1803

  * * *

  The men of the 2nd Battalion, the 9th Foot, had been waiting, muskets primed, on the rise south of Vimeiro since before dawn but, since their enemy remained out of sight, they piled arms and scoured the undergrowth for firewood. The hillside was soon dotted with camp kettles boiling up beef for breakfast, while a few soldiers stripped off their sweat-stained shirts and rinsed them in the River Maceira flowing along the bottom of the valley.1 It was only a brief respite. At around 9 a.m. French infantry, in white rather than their usual blue,* could be seen approaching, their progress marked by a great dust plume rising through the heat haze.

  Colin Campbell, second youngest ensign in the 2/9th, was a slight, wiry figure, his head a shade too big for his frame, the effect made worse by thick black curls. A determined brow compensated for the schoolboy air, but this officer’s most startling feature was his Glaswegian accent. Campbell had been in the army for barely a month, most of it spent on a naval transport. As an ensign he was tolerated rather than valued. Asked by a Portuguese general for an ensign to act as his aide-de-camp, the Duke of Wellington replied tartly, ‘An English ensign can be of little use to him – or to anybody else.’2

  In battle the two youngest ensigns held the regimental colours: one flag each, around 6ft square supported on a 9ft pole. Around the ensigns stood four sergeants. As the ensigns’ job was to guard the colours, so the sergeants’ job was to guard the ensigns. ‘“Defend the colours! Form upon the colours!�
�� is the first cry and first thought of a soldier when any mischance of battle has produced disorder,’ wrote Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Napier, ‘then do cries, shouts, firing, blows, and all the tumult of combat, thicken round the standard; it contains the honour of the band, and the brave press round its bearer!’3 At Albuera, Lieutenant Latham of the Buffs showed the tenacity required of an officer charged with them:

  Cleland, Jack, Paterson and Co.’s shop, from R. Chapman’s The Picture of Glasgow.

  He was attacked by several French hussars, one of whom, seizing the staff and rising in his stirrups, aimed a stroke at Latham’s head, which failed at cutting him down, but which sadly mutilated him, severing one side of his face and nose; he still struggled with the hussar, and exclaimed ‘I will surrender it only with my life!’ A second stroke severed his left arm and hand, in which he held the staff, from his body. He then seized the staff in his right hand, throwing away his sword, and continued to struggle with his opponents, now increased in numbers; when ultimately thrown down, trampled upon and pierced by the spears of the Polish lancers, his last effort was to tear the flag from the staff, as he lay prostrate, and thrust it into the breast of his jacket.4