“No war has had greater results on the history of the world or brought greater triumphs to England,” writes the historian Green when he comes to the Seven Years War, “but few have had more disastrous beginnings.” To that familiar note we are now inured. Military preparedness appears to be an impossibility in these islands. At the beginning of 1756 there were only three regiments fit for service, and after the collapse of the Duke of Cumberland’s army on the Elbe a year later “a despondency without parallel in our history took possession of our coolest statesmen, and even the impassive Chesterfield cried in despair, ‘We are no longer a nation’.” So often has the despondency been paralleled since, and so often survived, that one hesitates to repeat the old, old story for fear of encouraging the gloomy smugness of it once too often. There were 18,000 men waiting to cross the Channel at Quiberon in the summer of 1759, before Admiral Hawke scotched them. But now, in contrast to the despair of two years earlier, “the national spirit most gloriously disproved the charge of effeminacy which, in a popular estimate, had been imputed to the times”.
Edward Gibbon wrote these words when he looked back upon the military ardour which penetrated to the sleepy hesitations of country life at Buriton, near Petersfield, and which impelled his father to drive both of them into the Militia:
The country rings around with loud alarms,
And raw in fields the rude Militia swarms.
Gibbon remembered his Dryden. Left to himself, removed from his notorious habit of “obeying as a son”, Gibbon (one suspects) would have stayed where he was with his nose in his books and raising an occasional eye to consider and dismiss the prospect of marrying the next imperfect West Sussex lady on the calling list. Perhaps if he had not joined the Home Guard of 1759 Gibbon might have married from lack of having anything else to do, and then—who knows—we might be reading of the Birth and Rise, rather than of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. A woman, even one of the West Sussex chatterboxes, might have prevailed against the eighteenth-century taste for ruins. But Gibbon père had always been the decisive partner in the life of Gibbon fils. The father had put his foot down once or twice to some effect already; and having sent the youth to the Continent in order to rid him of Popery, he was equally determined on effacing the Frenchified personality and mind which the young man had brought back in exchange for his religion. Edward Gibbon was to be made into an Englishman, and on June 12th Major and Captain Gibbon received their commissions in the South Battalion of the Hampshires.
The story of Gibbon’s service with the Militia is well known. It can be read in his Autobiography, in his Journal, and in the various Lives, of which Mr. D. M. Low’s is especially thorough, sympathetic and readable. To the one-time Territorial, the conscript or the Home Guard of today Gibbon’s experiences are amusing, consoling and instructive. The peculiar torments which sting the amateur soldier seem to change very little from age to age. Joining to repel the invader at a moment’s notice, the Gibbons were very soon to find that the Navy had done it for them—Hawke sank the French at Quiberon in the following November—and that their patriotism had led them into the demoralising trap of soldiering without an enemy. Gibbon’s first impression confirmed the remaining lines of Dryden:
Mouths without hands maintained at vast expense,
In peace a charge, in war a weak defence.
Stout once a month they march, a blust’ring band,
And ever but in times of need at hand.
This was the more when, issuing on guard,
Drawn up in rank and file they stood prepar’d,
Of seeming arms to make a short essay;
Then hasten to be drunk—the business of the day.
As a writer, Gibbon found himself in charge of the battalion’s administrative and even literary affairs, which meant mainly conducting the correspondence and piling up the dossier of a row—“passionate and prolix”—a typical military row with a peer about precedence. When the danger of invasion had passed, the Major and the Captain hoped to be allowed to take their duties easily in Petersfield or Alton, but they were caught for two and a half years more and began an unheroic, tedious and often sordid progress round the South of England. Winchester was too near home for discipline; they went to Devon, where they were happy, to Devizes where the habits of the town were riotous—twenty-one courts-martial—to Porchester, where they guarded the French prisoners and many of the men caught fevers or the smallpox in the swampy wildernesses nearby, to Alton, where they entered the camp “indisputably the last and worst”.
To the Major this was all far less depressing than to the Captain. There was a vein of happy impetuosity and slackness in the Major’s character. He had always been at home in either the highest or the lowest society. He frequently cut parades, and when he did turn up his drill was terrible. Gibbon writes: “We had a most wretched field day. Major, officers and men seemed to try which should do worst.” The Captain did not claim to be perfect: “The battalion was out, officers but no powder. It was the worst field day we had had a good while, the men were very unsteady, the officers very inattentive, and I myself made several mistakes.” Still, there were consolations: “After going through the manual, which they did with great spirit, I put them … thro’ a variety of evolutions…. At the volley I made them recover their arms, not a piece went off.” Edward Gibbon was not one of those lackadaisical literary soldiers who hope their shufflings and errors will be lost in the crowd or that their sporadic brainwaves will impress the command. He was, as always, thorough, industrious and responsible; and some part of his suffering was due to his conscientiousness.
The qualities we expect of Gibbon are sense, balance and judiciousness. No man is more likely to give a more considered account of his experience, to extract the value from his disappointments, to gather in, perhaps complacently, all the compensations. The plump little man, only five feet high, with the bulging forehead and the bulbous cheeks, gazes like some imperturbable and learned baby at his life and can be trusted to give both sides of the question, if only for the sensuous pleasure of balancing a sentence:
The loss of so many busy and idle hours was not compensated by any elegant pleasure; and my temper was insensibly soured by the society of our rustic officers who were alike deficient in the knowledge of scholars and the manners of gentlemen. In every state there exists, however, a balance of good and evil. The habits of a sedentary life were usefully broken by the duties of an active profession; in the healthful exercise of the field I hunted with a battalion instead of a pack, and at that time I was ready at any hour of the day or night to fly from quarters to London, from London to quarters on the slightest call of private or regimental business. But my principal obligation to the militia was the making me an Englishman and a soldier. After my foreign education, with my reserved temper, I should long have continued a stranger in my native country, had I not shaken in this various scene of new faces and new friends; had not experience forced me to feel the characters of our leading men, the state of parties, the forms of office, and the operation of our civil and military system. In this peaceful service I imbibed the rudiments of the language and science of tactics which opened a new field of study and observation…. The discipline and evolutions of a modern battalion gave me a clearer notion of the Phalanx and the Legions, and the Captain of the Hampshire Grenadiers [the reader may smile] has not been useless to the historian of the Roman Empire.
He took Horace with him on the march and read up the questions of Pagan and Christian theology in his tent. Sooner or later, the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.
Gibbon, like Francis Bacon, Swift and Dr. Johnson, is a writer whose experience is digested and set forth like the summing-up of a moral judge. “My temper is not very susceptible of enthusiasm” … that is not really quite true, as his sudden conversion to Rome, his first meetings with Suzanne Curchod, his occasional feats with the bottle at Lausanne and in the militia seem to show. But if not phlegmatic, he is formal. The truth is that his temper was far more susceptible to style. For him style was the small, ugly man’s form of power. His shocking health as a child and youth, though astonishingly restored when he was sixteen years of age, must have inscribed on his heart and instincts the detachment, the reserve, the innate melancholy of invalid habits. The coldness which is alleged, the tepidity of feeling and the fixed air of priggishness and conceit, are misleading. Really, he is self-contained. In telling his own story he is not recklessly candid, but he is honest to a startling extent, and especially in disclaiming emotions which it is conventional to claim. His formality is comic, even intentionally so at times, and his detachment about himself may, of course, show an unconscionable vanity; but it also indicates the belief that a civilised man is one who ought to be able to stand the display of all the evidence. We think here particularly of his brief comment on Rousseau’s dislike of his character and behaviour: Rousseau, Gibbon mildly remarks, ought not to have passed judgment on a foreigner. (Or did Gibbon mean that a continental enthusiast ought not to pass judgment on an English country gentleman? It is quite likely he did mean this.) Gibbon is not ashamed to record his constant concern about money and property, nor to admit that his father’s recklessness about money alarmed him not only as a son, but as an heir. And after drawing the most gracious portrait of his father, he is careful not to end on the note of filial idolatry or remorse:
The tears of a son are seldom lasting. I submitted to the order of Nature, and my grief was soothed by the conscious satisfaction that I had discharged all the duties of filial piety. Few perhaps are the children who, after the expiration of some months or years, would sincerely rejoice in the resurrection of their parents; and it is a melancholy truth, that my father’s death, not unhappy for himself, was the only event that could save me from an hopeless life of obscurity and indigence.
It is a melancholy truth. Gibbon has a taste for the truth that is melancholy, for seeing life as a series of epitaphs. And yet in Reynolds’ portrait the fat little scholar with the second roll of chin, and the lips which seem set for the discharge of some destructive epigram, is not as sober as he looks. He is, in fact, cutting a dash. With the amateur soldier’s love of a splash and with a glance back at the heroic days when his Militia boldly exercised within sight of the French coast, he has put on his scarlet coat for the picture. “For in England the red ever appears the favourite and, as it were, the national colour of our military ensigns and uniforms.”