Man Of War

Park. But, says Kipling a century later:

In times of war, and not before,

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 Armee, 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

The barge cut through the swell with scarcely a motion but headway – testament to the determination with which her crew was bending oars. In the stern sat Captain Sir Laughton Peto RN, his eyes fixed on their objective, His Majesty’s Ship Prince Rupert – glorious sight against the backdrop of the Rock. To Peto’s mind Rupert was in no measure diminished by the towering crag; her three decks, her lofty masts, somehow outsoared the shadow of that Pillar of Hercules. Neither were her batteries belittled by those of the massive Montague Bastion, which Peto himself had only lately quit. Impregnable as was the citadel- Rock, Rupert was yet the most powerful of His Majesty’s ships at sea, a floating fortress able to send any of the King’s enemies to the bottom, as her forebears had done two decades earlier (and not many leagues to westward).

Any ship of the Royal Navy would look admirable at anchor in Gibraltar Bay, reckoned Peto: the Rock and the ‘Nelson chequer’ were as perfect a unity as any he could think of. As perfect as if they had been in Plymouth Sound, at Spithead, the Nore, or at Portsmouth. And Peto had been intent on nothing but the great three-decker from the moment he stepped into his barge.

She was an arresting picture, to be sure, but neither did it do for a captain, especially one of his seniority, to have eyes for so mere a thing as a boat’s crew; his attention must be on more elevated affairs than a midshipman and a dozen ratings. Above all, though, it was opportunity to study his new command as an enemy might. Peto was acquainted by reputation with her sailing qualities, but how might another, impudent, man-of-war’s captain judge her capability? He fancied he might know what a Frenchman would think. That mattered not these days, however; it was what a Turk thought that counted, for a year ago the Duke of Wellington, on the instructions of the foreign secretary, Mr Canning, had signed a protocol in St Petersburg by which Russia, France and Great Britain would mediate in the Greeks’ struggle for independence; and increasingly that protocol looked like a declaration of war on the Ottoman Turks.

What a mazy business it all was too: the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, on his sickbed for months, and in April the King sending for Canning to form a government, in which many including the ‘Iron Duke’ then refused to serve; and now Canning himself dead and the feeble Goderich in his place. Peto did not envy Admiral Codrington, the commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean, whose squadron he was to join: how might the admiral do the government’s will in Greek waters when the government itself scarcely knew what was its will? He could not carp, however, for he was the beneficiary of that uncertainty: soon after Rupert had left Portsmouth, where formerly she had been laid up in Ordinary, their lordships at the Admiralty had sent a signal of recall to her captain (and promotion to flag rank), followed by an order for him, Peto, to proceed at once to Gibraltar to take command in his stead.

The wind was strengthening. Peto did not have to take his eyes off his ship to perceive it. Nor did he need to crane his neck to mark the frigate-bird that accompanied them, tempting a prospect though such an infrequent visitor was – and sure weather vane too, for he had frequently observed how the bird preceded changeable weather, as if borne by some herald of new air. With a freshening westerly it would not be long before