As the war with the United States ended, Napier was awarded the sinecure of Governor of the Virgin Islands, a role which did not require him to visit the archipelago. Soon he was back home, returning to Europe in 1815 and missing Waterloo by one day. His time abroad had done nothing to trim his radical instincts. Napoleon had been swept from the field but Napier admitted to a thinly disguised admiration for the Corsican’s vision and achievements. Looking back at the personal trauma of the Peninsular War, his regret was that he had suffered essentially in vain, for, having freed Portugal from Napoleonic rule, the British had simply returned the country to its previous despotic government. The rigours and bloodshed of war had been for nothing:
We have flattered their vanity and deprived them of no public custom or ornament: we meddled not with their religion, we paid their soldiers when their own prince did not; and we might have done more on a sound system, but we always act on the confined basis of – present expediency. We might have regulated their whole civil government and founded a free nation, entirely and truly regenerating them as a people.
On the brink now of preferment to his first important job, as administrator in the Ionian Islands, Napier had learned certain lessons and noted certain errors. Portugal was a mistake Napier intended not to repeat, now that he had the responsibility for 60,000 souls on the island of Cephalonia.
In 1815, the strategically significant Ionian archipelago, that chain of islands off the west and south-west coast of Greece, was emerging from a stormy spell of government. It would remain a British possession until 1864. Indeed, an Anglophile thread in the culture of the islands can still be detected today.
When Napier arrived on Cephalonia in 1815, his observations rapidly confirmed all his theories about what proper government could do for the people or at least what it could if it was in his hands. His superior was Sir Thomas Maitland, Governor of Malta and Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands, who maintained a seat of administration on Corfu. Maitland was also something of an aristocratic military radical, imperious but sufficiently progressive as to disapprove of building barracks, for fear they would lead to military despotism, and to permit Napier himself a large measure of autonomy on Cephalonia itself.
Venetian rule over Cephalonia had been swept away but an Italian-speaking, Catholic Venetian elite continued to hold sway over an impoverished Greek Orthodox peasantry. Napier was determined to implement change and bring something of justice and fair play to the island. He positively relished tilting the scales against the powerful in favour of the weak, especially in the course of the legal proceedings over which he presided. His vision was perfectly clear. His role was to rule in the interests of the poor and against those of corrupt local elites. If that required being unfettered by the letter of overly fussy laws, so be it.
Napier and his trusty Irish deputy John Pitt Kennedy introduced one improvement after another. Roads, canals, quays and a lighthouse were constructed and they all rapidly proved their economic worth. In the marketplace, British officials displaced crooked middlemen taking advantage of illiterate peasants. Reliable British scales saw peasants get a true and fair price for their crops. Napier, in his road-building schemes, laid down a manual of extraordinarily progressive health and safety regulations for the labourers and, rather more to the point, their responsible overseers. What Napier did in the course of his absolute rule of Cephalonia was to master the administration of the island, through rational rule, detail, questionnaires, regulations being promulgated, officials being disinterested and authority being just.
Napier was well aware of the arbitrary nature of his rule but he regarded it as a moral solution to a pressing problem. After all, why should the people of Cephalonia not get the benefits of the good government he could and should give them? Were not Greeks people? What reason was there to suppose they were in any way unfitted for the gifts and advantages he could bestow upon them? It was an inescapable truth that the programme he offered was rule by technical experts for the common people and not rule by the (sadly as yet) inexpert people themselves. His biographer Edward Beasley, however, contends that Napier anticipated John Stuart Mill in embracing a progressivist solution. That is, evidently thinking that the only way to habituate people to the exercise of rights is to grant them first, albeit in a controlled environment.
Napier believed in his rule, in the rule of the state, embodied in this case by him, as a force for good. He saw this centralised notion of good as being a great deal more practical and moral than anything that private charity could offer. What was the point of the state if it could not function well and smoothly and with agility and if it could not head off problems before they materialised? Prompt action by Sir Robert Peel did precisely this in Ireland at this time. He managed to fend off famine by swiftly distributing relief where it was most needed and it was to Napier’s satisfaction that he in the same way pre-empted and defeated the prospect of famine in Cephalonia by swift, determined government action.
He was aware of the utility of visual cues too, in keeping the people onside. Until told by his superiors to trim it, Napier sported a beard reaching down to his chest in emulation of the Greek revolutionaries now planning a war of independence on the Turkish-ruled mainland. He went ‘native’, as it were, in more personal ways: his commitment to the island only deepened when his Greek nationalist mistress gave birth to his two daughters. (He, with their mother’s disinterested consent, took both girls with him when he eventually left Cephalonia and both in due course acquired a future general as a husband.)
Napier’s life intersected with another and rather better known champion of Greek independence at this time. The great Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron moored his boat Hercules in Argostoli harbour on the west coast of Cephalonia in August 1823. Napier was absent so Pitt Kennedy welcomed the poet to the island. Napier returned to Cephalonia a few days later. After a few weeks he persuaded Byron to leave the Hercules and enjoy his hospitality on dry land instead. He and Byron kindled a friendship, although Napier could not agree with Byron’s views on the wickedness of religion and took to addressing him as ‘Your Atheistship’.
There were many points of similarity between these two men and not least was this. Unlike many other British philhellenes they shared a belief not simply in the principle of Greek independence but also in the idea that freedom would not come by means of fine words. Greece would have to arm herself to be free, she would have to invest not only in cultural regeneration but in military hardware. This said, however, Napier was forced to decline the London Greek Committee’s offer to command the forces they were prepared to fund. He had a job to do on Cephalonia and he was the servant of the British government. This sense of duty was not quite enough to stop him travelling to London to raise funds for the cause of Greek independence and this in turn convinced his military superiors that he was wildly and dangerously anti-Turkish in his political views.
Napier had found something like a personal paradise in Cephalonia, which made his exile all the harder. Byron died of a fever at Missolonghi in April 1824 and Napier himself was removed from his post in 1826. He had returned to England on leave with Elizabeth, his wife (the aforementioned Mrs Kelly, who had married him a decorous year into her widowhood) and the blow of removal was the more bitter because they had returned home for the sake of Elizabeth’s health. She died in England. The context of this sad business, meanwhile, demonstrates how poorly Napier played the game of strategy. His brother William conducted a furious press campaign to have Napier returned to his post on Cephalonia but his efforts were counter-productive. The Army dug its heels in and Napier was never to return to his beloved Greece. He is remembered on Cephalonia today in the form of the Napier Gardens at Argostoli.
The course of Napier’s life had, though, been set. He was to rule men and for their own good. The question was, where next? The answer seemed to be the Antipodes, for he was offered and accepted the governorship of the fledging free, that is, non-penal, colony of South
Australia. However, he then declined the post when it became clear that the London-based administrators of the scheme would not give him the resources he had expertly determined were necessary to make a success of the new colony. His decision to renounce the role led directly to the publication of Colonization.
In the pages of Colonization, Napier, such a central figure in the story of the Victorian colonial project, attacked at every turn each intellectual premise on which the enterprise of colonisation rested. Were planted colonies an outlet for ‘surplus population’, for example? No, for what was ‘surplus population’? Nothing but a shockingly under-protected home population. Colonization vigorously pitted itself against the teachings of such fashionable theorists as Robert Malthus and James Martineau. The work of Malthus was much debated against the background of the Corn Laws but he also busied himself in the field of demographic theory, arguing that the ‘poor’ constituted a problem for society that could be addressed by checking their tendency to reproduce, a theory that disgusted Napier. Martineau, meanwhile, was criticised by Napier for merely directing fine moralising words towards the poor without doing anything concrete to alleviate their distress. All the other current cases made for Empire, a market for ‘over-produce’ or as an outlet for British capital, were likewise dismissed by Napier as misconceptions, which supplied retrospective justifications for things which had already been settled upon.
Beasley notes that a key influence on Napier was the Swiss historian and political economist Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi. Sismondi argued that the key task of the state was to maximise happiness not private profit and this in turn could best be achieved by ensuring that poor farmers had secure possession of their land. Revolution and rule by the mob was pointless, continued Sismondi. Rather, what was needed was rule by a competent, activist state. Every advanced idea was present, correct and approved of by Napier: a limit on the hours worked in the week, old-age pensions, an end to child labour, health insurance, profit-sharing and even ‘reform’ of landownership and inheritance rules.
What did this mean in practice? For Napier it meant a step towards a socially just utopia. His goal was the creation of a mass of peasant-proprietors. He wanted an end to the detested class of prosperous, middling farmers, the innate conservatism of which spoiled the view of his vision. Napier contemplated no great harm to his own class. Instead, the ‘bottom’ rung on the social ladder would be rigorously protected and its role in the economy enhanced. Curiously, the ‘top’ would be protected likewise and the whole middle of the yeomanry swept away.
Nonetheless, there was no element of self-serving pretence in Napier’s philosophy. ‘I would rather see Civil War, than see the people of England treated as they now are,’ he said and he meant it. His philosophy hung on the notion that people behaved badly only because they were governed badly. Hence those who must truly be held responsible were those bad rulers, whether those bad rulers were absentee landlords in Ireland, decayed Venetian aristocrats on Cephalonia or native rulers further afield.
Napier was not alone in his views. He had a good deal of contemporary radical company, for others, not least in Britain itself, were also in favour of annual parliaments, universal suffrage and the ballot. He was not alone either in calling for flogging to be abolished by the Army. Other officers agreed with him here, too. While Napier pressed for other rights to be granted to the private soldier – pensions, a savings bank for pay so that soldiers would not literally have to carry their money with them – there was always sound military reasoning at work. His views in many cases are not especially radical at all but are simply common sense. No, where Napier astounds is on his views on the Empire’s gravest failing, race.
In the free colony of South Australia as Napier would have governed it, he would have made the murder of an Aboriginal Australian a capital crime, to be punished as such. In India, suttee, the burning of a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre, would be the crime it would have been in England. Why not, argued Napier, when there was no human difference between the people of Sindh and the people of Britain, save for the fact that one had enjoyed British law for longer than the other.
His philosophy firmly rejected any distinctions on the basis of ethnicity. In India, his aim for the native population was to ‘give them justice, give them riches, give them honours, give them a share of all things till we blend with them and are one nation’. Unlike liberals today, Napier thought that there were no innate divisions between peoples. Rather, only their separate pasts made their presents different. Treat them the same and they would be the same. In his journal he was explicit: ‘Let children of many races be brought up in a country foreign to all and they will all be as the men of that country are.’ This was a noble vision.
These assumptions, of equality in the eyes of the law, combined with deference to the one true law, are now very unpopular among people with ‘correct’ opinions. The laws Napier upheld were his laws, British ones. By whose authority did he impose them on others, other than conquest? What right had he to do so? Napier’s test would have been moral utility, the very rightness, self-evidently so, of the laws he was bringing to people who had been unfortunate enough to go without them. The sincerity of his feelings can be seen when we consider what he thought of the woefully inferior British laws and customs he so heartily detested. Napier did not assert that what was British was right. Rather, he said that what was right was right and that people like him were gifted in detecting it. In the Britain in which he remained, instead of sailing forth to govern South Australia, he found error and villainy enough to be going on with, in the North of England.
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In early 1839, Charles Napier was given command of the Army in England’s Northern District. It is unknown whether his much-broadcast political views played a part in his being chosen. This was a man who had publicly written of his loathing for ‘the child-torturing murderers in the manufactories’, in which the North of England abounded. Yet he was the man entrusted by the Whig Home Secretary, Lord John Russell, with the task of maintaining peace in the industrial north during the Chartist unrest, which constituted the greatest period of domestic alarm since the end of the war with Napoleon.
Napier had no doubts about how any fighting would go. The Army would win, for how could they not? They were trained and equipped and well led; the would-be rioters were none of those things. This certainty only reinforced Napier’s desire that nothing their cruel and incompetent government might do should provoke the Chartists into any disorder, given that it could only end in such unfair bloodshed. On meeting the Home Secretary and his officials for the first time, the now Major General Napier was astonished to discover that they shared his aims, that they too were anxious to avoid violence, never mind provoke or pursue violence. Delighted but astonished as well, for this was not what his diagnosis of government had led him to expect. He was unabashed at this failing of theory, however, and set about his usual meticulous, professional work.
Napier was a great systematiser and now he wanted as much information collated as soon as possible about his new command. His languid predecessor cheerfully announced that he could tell him all he knew about the state of affairs in the north inside half an hour, which was not quite what Napier had in mind. He began touring his district to the great discomfort of Whitehall, where Thomas Babington Macaulay was the unfortunate civil servant who relentlessly pursued Napier to account for his travel and lodging expenses.
It is important to note that no consensus existed inside the government at this time. Did the Chartist activity constitute the worst crisis since the war? If it did, what should be the response? Napier immediately identified one mistake London was making. The government was empowering and arming militias, to supplement such police and army as existed in the region. This could not possibly be conducive to good public order. He was correct but the real reason for his opposition to the existence of such militias was his dislike of giving private armies to the local well-off, that is to the very same peo
ple he fully expected to provoke the poor into riot and disorder in the first place. He further disliked many of the magistrates with whom he had to deal, believing them prone to panic and exaggeration. Much of his early work was spent trying to coordinate them and to ensure a uniform official response to Chartist meetings.
The Chartist gatherings in the North of England had been imagined apprehensively as ‘monster’ meetings but they turned out to be smaller than had been anticipated. Napier took all of them, however, in his stride. Sympathetic as he was to the workers’ predicament and in agreement with their basic claims, he remained resolutely unalarmed. As he said to one of his junior officers, ‘we want more oil with our vinegar’. Yet there were real dangers. At Hull, for example, miners dug a shaft under the barracks in the town, the better to cause the structures to subside. Napier might have been phlegmatic but such actions can hardly have encouraged a veteran of Wellington’s armies.
The propertied classes noted that Napier was not precisely on their side and they protested that he would do well to listen to what the Chartists were actually declaring aloud. At Rochdale, for example, a Chartist leader told a cheering rally: ‘Arm yourselves well with pikes and firearms and get plenty of powder, for the time is near at hand when we must either put down the Government or the Government put down us.’ Moreover, for all Napier’s confidence in the prowess, should matters come to a head, of the Army, northern factory owners and landowners were practical men of business too. They knew the potential for lethal trouble. They knew that if anyone could produce the weapons of war it was the industrial men of the north. Lord John Russell, however, was on Napier’s side. He was not ill disposed to the rallying of Chartism in the north, for it bore out much of what he believed about what could flow from the absence of proper local aristocratic influence in the industrial towns and the want of true religion in such communities. A correction might come as a result of this imbalance and, if it did come, that was all to the good. The Home Secretary left Napier to take the decisions and assess whether his ameliorative methods could prevent something close to revolution.
The Victorians Page 9