The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (18 page)

“What a life he has led, what climates he has braved, how riddled and chopped to pieces with balls and bayonet and sabre wounds he is!”

 

C
harles Napier once described himself as “so thin, so sharp, so black, so Jewish, so rascally, such a knavish looking son of a gun,”
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though he was neither black nor Jewish, and was the son of a duke's daughter and a grandson of the Sixth Lord Napier. His father, Colonel George Napier, was of “the finest specimen of military manhood,”
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and his mother was a beauty so renowned that the king himself had proposed to her. Blue blood flowed on both sides of his family—and so did eccentricity; in an army rich with characters, Napier ranks as one of the most interesting, with his wire-rimmed glasses (he was seriously short-sighted, so much so that he once marched his troops directly into the French lines); leonine long hair (worn in honor of his Cavalier ancestors, it was said); flowing whiskers; a slight facial twitch (the result of a musket ball that blasted through his nasal passages and had to be yanked from his jaw bone—leaving him with periods when he felt he was suffocating); scars from other musket balls, bayonet thrusts, a crashing sabre to the head, and slamming gun butts; a limp stemming from another wound; a hooked nose; a passion for women (and marriage to dowagers); and a firm Christian faith (notwithstanding his two daughters being born out of wedlock to a Greek mistress).
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His liberal opinions were violently expressed, yet tempered by experience: he opposed flogging, for instance, but thought it satisfactory punishment for blackguards. Napier was a radical, but his patron and military idol was the arch-Tory Duke of Wellington. Multiple times wounded fighting the French in the Peninsular War, he nevertheless regarded Napoleon as a hero, both as a soldier and a politician. A gadfly critic of Britain's imperial methods, he was the Empire's willing executioner, defended British rule as better than the alternative, and was absolutely convinced that he could dramatically improve any land of which he was made a benevolent despot.

The family was prolific—he was one of eight children—and it thrived on military glory. Napiers studded the army. His brothers George and William made lieutenant-general and were knighted for their services. William became a prominent military historian and Charles's biographer. George lost an arm in action at Ciudad Rodrigo and later become governor-general and commander in chief of the Cape Colony, South Africa. Brother Henry became a naval captain and a historian of Florence (in six volumes), and the brothers' first cousin Charles was an admiral.

Napier grew up in Ireland, in a small town outside Dublin, in a warmhearted (if cash-poor) Protestant family. His father had fought in the American war (as well as against the French and Irish rebels). With a giant, strapping, handsome English father and his remarkably beautiful English mother, it was odd that Charles turned out rather short, slight, and, in his own words, Jewish and rascally-looking. He
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a bit of a rascal, with a violent temper and a large vocabulary for cursing, but he neither drank nor smoked nor gambled, and by his own lights (if not others', for he was a hugely contentious fellow), he treated no one badly. Thomas Carlyle, who professed to know something about heroes, pegged Napier as “a lynx-eyed, fiery man, with the spirit of the old knight in him. More of a hero than any
modern I have seen for a long time; a singular veracity one finds in him, not in his words alone, but in his actions, judgments, aims, in all that he thinks, and does, and says. . . .”
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He was sent to a school full of Catholics and embraced Catholic emancipation, which later stood him in good stead with his troops, who were overwhelmingly Irish. Commissioned at the age of twelve in the regiment of Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, his actual service began at age seventeen and saw him putting down Irish rebels, occasionally serving as an aide-de-camp, and clashing with the French in Portugal and Spain (from 1808 to 1812) in the Peninsular War where his brothers saw service and were wounded with him. Of one battle, Napier remarked, “George was hit in the stern and I in the stem. That was burning the family candle at both ends.”
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When he was shot in the face, he had the presence of mind, while carried away on a stretcher, to wave his hat in salute to Wellington.

He had brief stops in Bermuda, in the War of 1812, at a military college in England, and on the Continent after Napoleon escaped Elba. In 1818, he was made inspecting field officer of the Ionian Islands, then under British possession, and toured Greece where he, unofficially, advised Greek rebels in their fight against the Ottoman Turks (he liked the Greeks because they reminded him of the Irish). In 1822, he was made Military President of Cephalonia, the largest of the Ionian Islands. It was one of those peculiar imperial postings that suit peculiar geniuses. In Cephalonia, he acted as a sort of king and put into action a program of civil engineering works that had him draining marshes, building roads, constructing bridges, and generally
tidying up the place with manic Victorian energy. He fathered two daughters with a wild young Greek woman named Anastasia. When he left Cephalonia, he left her too, though he provided money to her, her parents, and his daughters, and took custody of the latter when Anastasia abandoned them and married a Greek. It was also while he was reigning over Cephalonia that he met Byron, who nearly convinced him to take command of the Greek rebel forces against the Turks. His happy days in Cephalonia ended when Major-General Sir Frederick Adam became high commissioner for the islands. Napier, who found few superiors to his liking, immediately fell into a blistering dispute with Adam and lost his post in 1830. He was offered another Ionian island, Zante, but turned it down. His Greek idyll was over.

So apparently was his career. He rejected a posting to Canada (too cold for his wife, a semi-invalid widow more than a decade his senior) and a governorship in Australia (by which time he was widowed himself). Had he gone to Australia—and he came to regret that he had not—Napier would have assured “that the usual Anglo-Saxon method of planting civilisation by robbery, oppression, murder, and extermination of natives should not take place under his government.” Instead, on half pay, he lived in exile in France writing books. Still, he was promoted and knighted (and remarried) and in 1838 was returned to active duty in the North of England. His duty was unsympathetic. Amongst the urban, industrial poor, he had to guard against riots by the Chartists—a radical movement of political reform, whose goals (including universal manhood suffrage) he supported, even if he could not support the Chartist
leaders (whom he called “demagogues of evil”) or their violent methods. He was contemptuous of the Whigs (the liberals), for their truckling to the mob, and fearful of a possible Tory crackdown. Though he did his duty well, the work was, he felt, morally debilitating: “A man is easily reconciled to act against a misled people if he has an honest plan of his own; but if he is only a servant of greater knaves than those he opposes, and feels he is giving strength to injustice, he loses the right stimulus to action.”
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In 1841 he was rescued by an invitation to command in India. He did not immediately accept—India, he thought, was no place for his wife or his daughters—but the chance for military glory was always a great goad to him, and there were mercenary reasons as well: “All I want is to catch all the rupees for my girls; and then die like a gentleman.”
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But once in harness he was less concerned about dying like a gentleman than in the marvelous prospect of leading troops to victory. He had his opportunity in Sind, a southern gateway from India to Afghanistan. Britain had a treaty with the emirs (the Baluchi rulers of Sind), but the emirs had not abided by it, and they were certainly opposed to the more stringent treaty that Napier was empowered to present them. Napier despised the emirs and looked forward to annexing Sind, because “Peace and civilization will then replace war and barbarism. My conscience shall be light for I see no wrong in so regulating a set of tyrants who...have in sixty years nearly destroyed the country.”
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