Man Of War

God and the soldier men adore;

When the war is o’er and all things righted,

The Lord’s forgot and the soldier slighted.

Certainly army officers, especially when in regimentals, remained acceptable in society after Bonaparte had ceased his great disturbing. It was the rank and file who all too quickly regained their status as ‘the brutal and licentious’. Sailors were spared this ignominy to some extent, for when they were not at sea they did not greatly trouble the country – at least not beyond a few ports. Their officers may have lost a little status (in the opinion of Sir Walter Elliot of Kellynch Hall they had, of course, possessed little in the first place), but the relative fortunes of the army and the Royal Navy were anyway changing. Traditionally, Britain had entrusted her prosperity and safety to her ‘wooden walls’, the ships that kept the seas safe for her merchantmen, and saw off the periodic threats of invasion. There was a hearty fear of a standing army and the expense and hazard of continental campaigns. And this was no less so, to begin with, in the war with revolutionary France. The death of Nelson had moved the fleet and the nation; the ‘band of brothers’ – Nelson’s captains – and their younger siblings had not imagined, however, that their service would soon be eclipsed by men in red coats ashore. After 1808, when Bonaparte’s invasion of the Iberian Peninsula gave Britain her chance to come to grips with the real Napoleonic engine of war, the Grande Armée, Trafalgar became rather a distant, if hallowed, memory; Salamanca, Talavera, Vitoria – these and others were the names that thrilled an Englishman in the decade that followed. And then the greatest of them all – Waterloo, the Iron Duke’s culminating victory, which sent Bonaparte to his distant, fatal exile, and ushered in the concert of Europe on which an everlasting peace was to be built.

Now, however, in 1827, two decades after Trafalgar, the pendulum of military fortune was swinging back: it was His Majesty’s ships that would again make war in the cause of peace and of liberty; the slave trade was being vigorously suppressed, and a triple alliance of Britain, France and Russia would oblige the Turks to quit Greek waters – the very cause for which Byron had died in the Peloponnese, and which philhellenes throughout Europe had long promoted. The Royal Navy was at last resurgent. Men like Matthew Hervey’s friend Captain Sir Laughton Peto, who had thought themselves beached, would have their chance once more.

But what of those in red coats? There were certainly far fewer of them than at any time in the life of all but the most grey-haired. Many were gaining a good dusting in far-flung corners of the growing empire; Hervey’s own uniform, though blue not red, had had a good dusting in India, and of late in the Cape Colony. But the growing use of the army to police the nation’s agrarian, industrial and political unrest made the cavalry unwelcome in some quarters (‘Peterloo’ was on the lips of many a rabble-rouser yet, and in the pages of the radical press). And when the explosive element of Catholic emancipation was added, coupled inextricably as it was with the condition of Ireland, society at times looked distinctly brittle. The old order was changing; the statesmen and soldiers who had brought Bonaparte to his knees and had managed to keep a lid on the unrest during the economic depression that followed were passing. New men gilded the ancient games.

This, then, is Matthew Hervey’s world, simple soldiering no longer his refuge. Family and friends are become equally a source of comfort and of disquiet. His future is on the one hand settled and propitious; on the other, uncertain and discouraging:

Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear Friends, when firstThe clouds which wrap this world from youth did pass . . .And from that hour did I with earnest thoughtHeap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore.Shelley

I

A FIRST-RATE COMMAND

Gibraltar, 28 September 1827