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English Men of Action

SIR CHARLES NAPIER

[Illustration: Logo]


[Illustration: SIR CHARLES NAPIER.]


SIR CHARLES NAPIER

by

COLONEL SIR WILLIAM F. BUTLER







London
Macmillan and Co.
And New York
1890

All rights reserved




CONTENTS

   CHAPTER I
                                                     PAGE
   THE HOME AT CELBRIDGE--FIRST COMMISSION              1


   CHAPTER II

   EARLY SERVICE--THE PENINSULA                        14


   CHAPTER III

   CORUNNA                                             27


   CHAPTER IV

   THE PENINSULA IN 1810-11--BERMUDA--AMERICA--ROYAL
   MILITARY COLLEGE                                    46


   CHAPTER V

   CEPHALONIA                                          62


   CHAPTER VI

   OUT OF HARNESS                                      75


   CHAPTER VII

   COMMAND OF THE NORTHERN DISTRICT                    86


   CHAPTER VIII

   INDIA--THE WAR IN SCINDE                            98


   CHAPTER IX

   THE BATTLE OF MEANEE                               117


   CHAPTER X

   THE MORROW OF MEANEE--THE ACTION AT DUBBA          136


   CHAPTER XI

   THE ADMINISTRATION OF SCINDE                       152


   CHAPTER XII

   ENGLAND--1848 TO 1849                              175


   CHAPTER XIII

   COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF IN INDIA                        188


   CHAPTER XIV

   HOME--LAST ILLNESS--DEATH                          203




CHAPTER I

THE HOME AT CELBRIDGE--FIRST COMMISSION


Ten miles west of Dublin, on the north bank of the Liffey, stands a
village of a single street, called Celbridge. In times so remote that
their record only survives in a name, some Christian hermit built here
himself a cell for house, church, and tomb; a human settlement took root
around the spot; deer-tracks widened into pathways; pathways broadened
into roads; and at last a bridge spanned the neighbouring stream. The
church and the bridge, two prominent land-marks on the road of
civilisation, jointly named the place, and Kildrohid or "the church by
the bridge" became henceforth a local habitation and a name, twelve
hundred years later to be anglicised into Celbridge. To this village of
Celbridge in the year 1785 came a family which had already made some
stir in the world, and was destined to make more.

Colonel the Hon. George Napier and his wife Lady Sarah Lennox were two
remarkable personages. The one a tall and majestic soldier, probably the
finest specimen of military manhood then in the service of King George
the Third; the other a lady of such beauty, wit, and grace that her
fascination had induced the same King George to offer her all his heart
and half his throne. Fate and politics marred this proposed romantic
royal union, and the lovely Lady Sarah, after a most unhappy first
marriage, became in 1777 the wife of Colonel George Napier, and in the
following dozen years the mother of a large family, in whose veins ran
the blood of a list of knights and kings and nobles sufficient to fill a
peerage all to itself; for on one side the pedigree went back to the
best of the old Scottish cavaliers--to Montrose, and the Napiers of
Merchiston, and the Scotts of Thirlestane; and on the other it touched
Bourbon, Stuart, and Medici, and half a dozen other famous sources. It
would have been strange if from such parents and with such stock the
nest which was built in Celbridge in 1785 did not send forth far-flying
birds.

The house in which the Napiers took up their residence in this year
stood a short distance from the western end of the village. It was a
solid, square building of blue-gray limestone, three-storied and
basemented, with many tall narrow windows in front and rear, and a hall
door that looked north and was approached by arched steps spanning a
wide stone area surrounding the basement; green level fields, with
fences upon which grew trees and large bushes, spread around the house
to north and west, and over the tops of oak and beeches to the south a
long line of blue hills lay upon the horizon. Looking south towards
these hills the eye saw first a terrace and garden, then a roadway
partly screened by trees, and beyond the road the grounds of Marley
Abbey sloping to the Liffey, holding within them still the flower-beds
and laurel hedges amid which Vanessa spent the last sorrow-clouded years
of her life. But to the boys up in the third-story nursery, looking out
in the winter evenings to snowy Kippure or purple Sleve-rhue, the loves
and wrongs of poor Vanessa mattered little. What did matter to them,
however--and mattered so much that through a thousand scenes of future
death and danger they never forgot it--was, that there stood a certain
old larch tree in the corner of the pleasure-ground where the peacocks
fluttered up to roost as the sun went down beyond the westmost Wicklow
hill-top, and that there was a thick clump of Portugal laurels and old
hollies where stares, or starlings as they call them in England, came in
flocks at nightfall, and sundry other trees and clumps in which
blackbirds with very yellow winter beaks flew in the dusk, sounding the
weirdest and wildest cries, and cocked their fan-spread tails when they
lighted on the sward where the holly and arbutus berries lay so thick.

When Colonel Napier settled at Celbridge he was still in his prime, a
man formed both in mind and body to conquer and direct in camp, court,
or council; and yet, for all that, a failure as the world counts its
prizes and blanks in the lottery of life. He had recently returned from
the American War, where he had served with distinction. He had filled
important offices abroad and at home, and by right of intellect and
connection might look forward almost with certainty to high military
command, but he had one fatal bar against success in the career of arms,
as that noble profession was practised in the reign of George the Third
and for a good many years after--he was in political opinion intensely
liberal and intensely outspoken. The phrase "political opinion" is
perhaps misleading. Colonel Napier's liberalism was neither a party cry
nor a prejudice. It sprang from a profound love of justice, an equally
fixed hatred of oppression, and a wide-reaching sympathy with human
suffering that knew no distinction of caste or creed. The selection of
Celbridge as the Napiers' family residence at this period was chiefly
decided by the proximity of the village to the homes of Lady Sarah's two
sisters--the Duchess of Leinster at Carton, and Lady Louisa Conolly at
Castletown--indeed only the length of the village street separated the
beautiful park of Castletown from the Napiers' home, and Castletown
woods and waters were as free to the children's boyish sports and
rambles as its saloons were open to them later on when the quick-running
years of boyhood carried them into larger life. Whatever was beautiful
and brilliant in Irish society--and there was much of both--then met in
the Castletown drawing-rooms. They were to outward seeming pleasant
years, those seventeen hundred and eighties and early nineties in
Ireland. The society that met at Castletown formed a brilliant circle of
orators, soldiers, wits, and statesmen, many of whose names still shine
brightly through the intervening century. Grattan, Curran, Flood,
Charlemont, the Ponsonbys, Parnell, the Matthews, and younger but not
less interesting spirits were in the group too; the ill-fated Lord
Edward Fitzgerald (first cousin to the Napier boys); young Robert
Stewart, still an advanced Liberal,--not yet seeing that his road to
fortune lay behind instead of before him; and there was another
frequent guest at Castletown--a raw-boned, youthful ensign, generally
disliked, much in debt to his Dublin tailor, but nevertheless regarded
by Colonel Napier, at least, as a young man of promise, who, if fate
gave him opportunity, would some day win fame as a soldier--one Ensign
Wellesley, or, as he then wrote his name, Arthur Wesley.

When the Napier coach drove into Celbridge with the newly-arriving
family in 1785, there was in it a very small boy, Charles by name, the
eldest son of the handsome colonel and his beautiful wife--a small,
delicate-looking child, who had been born at the Richmond residence in
Whitehall just three years earlier. Two other children younger than
Charles made up, with the due complement of nurses and boxes, an
imposing cavalcade, and for days after the arrival baggage and
books--these last not the least important items in the family
future--continued to trundle through the village.

Twelve years go by; 1797 has come. Long ago--what an age in childhood
seem these few flying years!--little Charles has made himself at home in
a circle ever widening around the Celbridge nest. He has a fishing-rod,
and the river east and west has been explored each year a longer
distance. He has a pony, and the mountains to the south have given up
their wonders to himself and his four-footed friend. And finally,
grandest step of all in the boy's ladder, he has a gun, and the
wood-pigeons of Castletown and the rabbits out in big fences to the west
know him as one more enemy added to the long list of their foes.

And how about the more generally recognised factors of
boy-training--school and schoolmaster? Well, in these matters we get a
curious picture of army-training in that good old time when George the
Third was King. At the age of twelve little Charlie Napier had been
nominated to a pair of colours in His Majesty's Thirty-Third Regiment of
Foot. War had broken out with France. Mr. Pitt was borrowing some fifty
millions every year, and commissions in Horse, Foot, and Dragoons, in
Hessian and Hanoverian Corps, in Scotch Fencibles and Irish Yeomanry and
English Militia