It is worth concluding these thoughts on Palmerston by returning to the vexed issue of populism. His success at keeping the people in his column has sometimes been used against Palmerston, in order to diminish him and to imply that he was a lesser political leader than certain of his peers. Certainly he excelled at what we might today term the ‘black arts’ of spin and media management. He cultivated relationships with journalists, made himself open to the press in a way that was not ‘done’ in those days and moulded the news agenda with a skilful hand. No wonder some people disliked him.
The point is that Palmerston, like Peel, understood the function of the press in Britain and thus he sought to influence this function. In a letter of 1831, written in the aftermath of a critical piece appearing in the Courier, he made his attitudes plain. His initial plan had been to argue with the editor but he recognised:
… the only influence which my office possesses over the Courier or any other paper, is positive and not negative. I could get him to insert any article I wish today, but I have no means or power of preventing him from inserting any other of quite a different kind tomorrow. I can impel but I cannot control … The only communication which takes place is, that every now and then when we have a particular piece of news, it is given to the editor, and he thereby gets a start on his competitors, and on the condition of receiving these occasional intimations he gives his support to the government; but no editor would bring his daily articles to a public office to be looked over before they are printed, and no public officer who had any sense in his brains would undertake the responsibility of such inspections.
Palmerston was responsive to the press and would see any editor who came to visit him. He was also willing to help journalists in difficulties abroad, on one occasion even saving two Post correspondents from being shot in Spain. Rather less creditably, he was able to use secret service funds to bribe people to be supportive. He went through £2,500 per month in a secret slush fund for spies and espionage. This did not mean that the press inevitably supported his policies, which he recognised, and his attitudes began to alter and evolve. The longer he remained in office, the more Palmerston began to realise there was an opportunity for pushing his opinions via newspapers. The 1857 General Election was won, according to some, because of Palmerston mania which swept the country and this in turn was based upon his careful development of relations with newspapers including The Times.
Palmerston was so successful at these various strategies that some press allies were perceived to be his personal rather than his party’s supporters. He used money and skill to place articles that put him in a good light and advanced his policies. This did not axiomatically make them bad policies, as he pointed out in a speech to the House of Commons, in answer to a charge that the people would be quiet if not egged on by reformers. ‘That when the government, and the press and the public are all of the same opinion,’ he said, ‘it may be possible that the opinion is not a fallacy.’ Later, he stated more plainly that ‘the besetting sin of the late administration was a defiance of public opinion, of public opinion at home, of public opinion abroad; a belief that the firm will and steady determination of a few men in power could bear down the opinions of the many, and stifle the feelings of mankind.’ He wanted, in other words, to listen to the reasonable views of the wider population. Naturally he wanted to lead, and he deployed the tools that allowed him to do it, but it was always with a clear sense of moral purpose.
‘The interest of England is the polar star, the guiding principle of the conduct of the government.’ Palmerston said this as Foreign Secretary in 1839 and it is a comment that was true of his whole career and the people believed him. They saw that Palmerston was on their side and shared their desire for a great and prosperous nation. He exercised his power in the national interest and served faithfully for decades. His life of duty, patriotism and political skill makes him one of the greatest Victorians.
Napier: The Great Radical
Many of the truly eminent Victorians whose lives are traced in this book are well and honourably memorialised, in busts and plaques and more the length and breadth of Britain. Few are so honourably remembered as General Sir Charles Napier (10 August 1782–29 August 1853), a bronze of whom stands grandly on its plinth in the south-western corner of Trafalgar Square in central London. Ironically, far from everyone remembers Napier’s life and achievements. Indeed, some go out of their way to ignore him.
Take the scene in 2000, when the then Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, was proud to speak boastfully of his ignorance. Who was this Napier, asked Livingstone, and why was he so visibly commemorated in the heart of London? What was Napier’s relevance to the lives of ordinary Londoners? Leaving aside the obvious reply that there are no ordinary Londoners but only extraordinary ones, Mr Livingstone, who ought to know his London better, should perhaps have taken himself off to St Paul’s. Here, another memorial, this one in marble, stands in the cathedral crypt and its inscription tells us very pithily who Napier was and what legacy he has left:
A prescient general
A beneficent governor
A just man
As for relevance: his importance to his own peers is revealed by the note on his statue, which shows that it was erected by public subscription, with the largest number being private soldiers.
However, it may be that Mr Livingstone’s disdain could have stemmed from some other source than ignorance. He might have seen something in Napier that he did not quite like: a prototype Tony Blair. For both Blair and Napier were in their way sincere patriots, whose actions were questioned in their own time on grounds of prudence and coherence. Each lustily made a case for themselves and for their virtue. Neither was at moral fault for the failures of their ambitions, though it is clear now that each might usefully ask themselves whether these ambitions, though honestly formed, were in fact sensibly held.
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General Sir Charles Napier, GCB, late Commander-in-Chief India, and ‘Conqueror of Sindh’, was a grand radical. Although his ancestry and cousinhood were as elevated as they could be, these associations certainly did not stop him from holding all sorts of opinions from well beyond the confines of the pale.
This chapter will in part focus not merely on the achievements of this grand radical but on the limits of those achievements and this is partly to illustrate a sense of why Victorian conquest and Victorian rule were not one and the same thing, even if, as in Napier’s case, they were accomplished by the same man.
Napier was not universally popular in his own era. He was accused of allowing the rape of the womenfolk of tribal Islamic rulers he had displaced and of being an enthusiastic flogger of men. The Victorian condemnation of Napier was such as to make him seem almost a Victorian caricature of a Victorian. He was smeared for his aggression, temper, bloodlust and even his supposed imperialism. To accept these slurs unquestioningly, however, would be unfair and it is worth remembering that the Victorian literary industry was almost as enthusiastic as our own in the matter of the pulverisation of reputations.
For it is certainly the case that Napier could surprise. He was a general, colonial governor and aristocrat by pedigree, who could ask of the early Victorian world through which he moved: ‘Are we not the most scientific, and most wealthy nation in the world?’, in order that he might then demand, ‘Are we not so miserable, so starving, that no one can say that the poor will not rise up upon, and destroy the rich?’ He did not even ask such questions in an off-the-cuff manner but deliberately, thoughtfully, coolly, in the pages of Colonization, Particularly in Southern Australia, with Some Remarks on Small Farms and Overpopulation (1835), a work devoted to kicking away the struts of every contemporary rationale offered up for the enterprise.
Napier despaired of the rulers, idolised the ruled and would have solved their problems with radical answers had the temper of his own age allowed it. In short, though misdrawn by contemporaries, this was no Victorian as the current caricatures would have him. Rather, he was
a colour-blind colonial governor who rejected the preoccupations of race and wished to see mankind merged in one common humanity. This is not the Napier so thoroughly disliked by the critics of the contemporary world. There are two episodes in the life of Napier that help to illuminate this theme of surprise, of counter-intuition, and that stretch our conception of the man and his role. The first was his Army command in the North of England during the time of Chartist unrest, when he strained above all else to avoid another Peterloo-like riot. The second, in India, shows what a man like Napier, with his views on good government, thought governing was for and shows too the gulfs that then can sometimes exist between good intentions and good results.
Whether in Britain or her empire overseas, what Napier saw was that:
Justice and religion are mockeries in the eyes of ‘a great manufacturing country’, for the true god of such a nation is mammon. I may be singular, but, in truth, I prefer the despotic Napoléon to the despots of the East India Company. The man ambitious of universal power generally rules to do good to subdued nations. But the men ambitious of universal peculation rule only to make themselves rich, to the destruction of happiness among a hundred millions of people.
Few Victorians saw Napoleon as possessing many of the qualities they yearned to see manifest in their own lands but Napier did and this influence derived directly from his family.
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Charles Napier’s childhood was steeped in the cultures of Scotland and Ireland and was perfumed with a delicious touch of scandal. His father, George Napier, was the impoverished scion of Scottish aristocracy, while his mother was the famous Lady Sarah Lennox, who was raised in Ireland before returning to become a favourite of George III. She married Charles Bunbury, gave birth to an illegitimate child, ran away with her lover before being abandoned by him and was divorced by Bunbury all before the age of thirty-one. She and George Napier married in 1781 and Charles was the eldest of their eight children. He was born in Whitehall, in the heart of London, but the family moved to Ireland when he was three and settled west of Dublin, in Co. Kildare. George Napier took up a post as Comptroller of Army Accounts and the family was still in Ireland to witness first-hand the United Irishmen uprising of 1798, which was accompanied by an abortive French invasion of Ireland. George Napier reinforced the family home and armed the household for the duration of the uprising.
Napier’s family tree was complicated but it has its hereditary radical roots that went deep and stretched wide. The Lennox kin, for example, included Charles, brother of Sarah. He was the third Duke of Richmond and was known as the ‘radical Duke’, on account of his keen support of all au courant causes, from parliamentary reform to the American colonists in their struggle against the Crown. Sarah’s sister Emily married the future Duke of Leinster, who was a ‘Patriot’, which is to say a popular politician in pre-Union Ireland. Their seat was at Castletown, probably Ireland’s grandest country house, and their offspring included Lord Edward Fitzgerald, who played a prominent and rebellious part in the events of 1798 and who died from the wounds received while resisting arrest on a charge of treason. Another sister, Caroline, married the prominent Whig politician Henry Holland, thus making her the mother of the dangerously radical Whig stateman Charles James Fox.
In other words, there was no shortage of radical example in Napier’s family, though it is worth noting that the British have sustained and tolerated this tradition of ‘hereditary radicals’ only because this cosseted caste failed, at home and abroad, time after time, to achieve the goals it set out for itself. As much as anything else, it was the lesson which first the French Revolution and then the Napoleonic dictatorship taught, that inoculated the British against excess and kept these radicals from doing much harm.
George Napier, however, was remarkable not for some putative radical streak but rather because he was an honest Comptroller of the Army in eighteenth-century Ireland. His example caused his son to have no guilty, familial hesitations in his lifetime’s detestation of the ‘old corruption’. It is also worth noting that, although he was as much a foe of the British ancien régime as all in his milieu, George Napier tended to temper his radicalism. ‘Our King sends millions to slaughter,’ he remarked, ‘and yet we cannot, in common sense, wish his crown to fall and to belong to a republic of tyrants, as all republics are.’ This was the creed of a man who saw practical boundaries to even the greatest causes and he bestowed this legacy of pragmatism on his son.
There were other influences and imprints upon the life of the young Charles Napier. In Ireland, his family were essentially dependants of their kin of Castletown and Charles went to the village day school. He was therefore always aware of the financial and material travails of everyday life and this in turn meant that his critique of the status quo was grounded in his own observation and ran deeper than most. His financially insecure Irish youth, moreover, left him far apart from the rest of his class, both in Ireland and later in England. Not for him the rural patriotism of the Tory squirearchy, who managed to modernise their own land while retaining their traditional views. Instead there was the furious radicalism required of someone who had seen the failures of farming in Ireland and understood that the problem lay squarely with that country’s absentee landlords.
Throughout his later life as a ruler of men, this problem, how the poor might provide for themselves and how the just might rearrange the structure of society and the economy to allow this to happen, was one to which Napier repeatedly returned. In Ireland, England and later in the course of postings in the British protectorate of the Ionian Islands and the Indian province of Sindh, the problem was always essentially the same, though the answer worked out unevenly, if at all. Napier’s misfortune was that his response to that which he abhorred, in short, capitalist modernity, was pre-modern and uneconomic. Like so many radicals, his urges were profoundly reactionary in origin.
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Enlisting in the Army was the inescapable fate for a well-born but relatively poor young man. The Napier boys were nonetheless good at it and produced three generals out of five sons, which even by Victorian standards was above average. Of all his many relations, his brother William was the closest and the pair remained in constant touch, writing continually to one another. William, as a roughhousing historian, was to be of questionable use to Charles in the political battles which lay ahead. One of Napier’s numerous cousins, meanwhile, was another Charles James Napier. Known in the family as ‘Black Charlie’, he became a renowned admiral. His sixty years of service saw him in action as a young man in the wars against Napoleon and as a veteran in the war in Crimea, and all this before he was elected to the Commons in 1855.
Napier thus had large shoes to fill when he enlisted in the Army in 1799, at the age of seventeen. He first saw action in the Peninsular War. The conflict erupted in 1807 and by 1809 Napier had retired from the field, following his experiences at the Battle of Coruña in January of that year. The battle was, on paper at least, a victory for the British. The army was in disorderly retreat at this time across the harsh winter landscape of north-west Spain and hoping to embark for home on transport ships lying in port at La Coruña. When they arrived at the coast, however, the ships were not there. They did finally arrive and the British repulsed a last-minute French attack, boarded and sailed but the price was high. The retreat was felt as a bitter humiliation, with The Times noting, ‘The fact must not be disguised … that we have suffered a shameful disaster.’ Worse still, the British commander, Sir John Moore, was killed in the battle and worst of all, at least from his family’s point of view, was that Napier himself was grievously injured in the retreat and taken captive by the French as a prisoner of war.
Years later, ‘Black Charlie’, now an MP, described to the Commons his cousin’s experience in battle:
Something occurred to impede them – [Charles] was surrounded by French troops – received a cut on the head with a sabre – was stabbed in the back with a bayonet – a bullet went through his leg, and two
of his ribs were broken by a cannon-ball. ‘I think (said the gallant officer) that was a dose enough to settle any man.’
French arms caused the injuries but French medical treatment saved Napier’s life. He had been left for dead by the British and indeed had not the French picked him up and behaved impeccably towards him, he could not have lasted the day. In England, his will was read and it revealed provisions he had made for a Mrs Kelly, the wife of the Hythe Barracks master whose husband was still very much alive. Within a few months, Napier was back in England. A British ship was sent to enquire after the injured and dead and, upon discovering that he was among the living, an agreement was struck with France to permit Napier to return home.
Napier was no coward but he never exulted in war. To his mother he wrote, ‘Military life is like dancing up a long room with a mirror at the end, against which we cut our faces, and so the deception ends. It is thus gaily men follow their trade of blood, thinking it glitters, but to me it appears without brightness or reflection, a dirty red!’ Throughout his life as a fighting general or as an administrator of law and order, Napier would strive to avoid blood being spilt. He detested too the practice of flogging that was so common in the Army, even going so far as to write a book denouncing it.
Napier returned to service in Iberia, seeing service at Badajoz and a range of other battles. His next Army service took him to North America, where he saw action in the War of 1812 as part of the 102nd Regiment. This regiment had a reputation as the ‘worst in the Army’ and Napier’s task was to fashion this body of men into an efficient fighting force. He loathed the conduct of the war in the United States. He hated to hear the American enemy speak his own tongue and was disgusted with the atrocious behaviour of British units formed out of French deserters. Yet he was still Charles James Napier, full of vision and schemes for change that would never be fulfilled. This time, in the American theatre, he argued that slaves should be armed, and that he should be at their head. No reply came from high command and years later Napier was still improving on his plan, settling in his mind that, had he been permitted to give the slaves their liberty, he would have resettled them in Canada. At a stroke providing them with a livelihood and at the same time populating Canada itself against possible aggression from the United States.
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