‘It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather, we should thank God that such men lived’
General George S. Patton Jr
‘Few persons connected his name with any thought of age or decline,’ declared the Glasgow Herald, ‘for there had been nothing of either in his public acts. Indeed, although he has passed away in the evening of his years, he is cut short in the noon of his fame and his powers.’1
Colin Campbell’s had requested a modest burial in Kensal Green Cemetery, a request typical of a frugal general who ‘found it more difficult to encounter the public thanks of his countrymen, than the batteries of the enemy’,2 but both army and government knew that the British public would not let him bow out that quietly. The clamour from the obituary writers for him to be interred in one of the great cathedrals was hard to resist, and so, with the queen’s blessing, the Secretary for War arranged a plot in Westminster Abbey with full honours. The funeral was scheduled for 22 August 1863.
Even before his death, praise had been effusive. ‘Sir Colin Campbell has, I believe, only one fault: a courage too reckless for his country’, declared Disraeli. ‘An union of personal valour so eminent, with strategy so prudent, has seldom been presented in the history of great military commanders.’3 When Campbell received an honorary degree from Oxford University, it was in the company of Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Dr David Livingstone. During a visit to his home town of Glasgow, the crowds were larger than any since the queen’s tour of the city seven years before.4 Staffordshire potteries produced figurines of him (see Plate 37), sheet music publishers put him on the covers of Scottish reels and tobacconists used his face to sell cigars. By his death there were more pubs in London named after him than Nelson.
If in England he was held up as the greatest soldier of his day, in his native Scotland he was elevated to demi-god. ‘One of the greatest generals whom Great Britain ever produced, and second to none in the advantages he has gained for his country’, claimed the Glasgow Herald:
Wellington did not exceed him in the combination of prudence in danger, with vigour in execution, by which he was distinguished. Like Marlborough he never fought a battle he did not gain, nor sat down before a place he did not take. The saviour of India may well take a place in British history, second only to the conqueror of Napoleon and the humbler of the pride of Louis XIV.5
Campbell’s achievements seemed all the more admirable given the apparent obscurity of his birth. ‘How great must have been the perseverance, the courage and the discretion of such a friendless and penniless boy to have raised himself to a peerage and to the Colonelcy of the Coldstream Guards, can be known only to those who understand the aristocratic traditions of the British army’, wrote the Daily News. ‘It needed more than forty years of arduous service, a Russian war, and a tottering empire before such a man could obtain promotion or a reasonable reward.’6 ‘If ever there was a peer who won name and nobility by sheer hard work’, wrote William Russell of The Times, ‘it was he.’7 But even as a peer he could still be a boat-rocker. ‘He was too independent to be a courtier; wrapped up only in his country … too single-hearted to be a political partisan’, as the Glasgow Herald diplomatically put it.8
That independent spirit had been a handicap. ‘To the “authorities” the career of Colin Campbell, Lord Clyde, stands forth as a flagrant scandal’, declared The Morning Post:
It is to be hoped that it may in future act as a useful warning. Not once in a career of fifty years did official patronage visit with common justice, still less with generosity, merits that were palpable to all besides. The advancement that was tardily and grudgingly meted out to him was even then always a degree in arrears. Such continuous blindness, or such persistent injustice at headquarters was incredible.9
The Daily News continued in similar vein:
Though he had contributed much to the victory of the Alma – though he had watched day and night the lines of Balaklava – though he had met the onset of the Russian horse with the famous ‘thin red line’, disdaining to throw his men into square – though he had proved himself the ablest officer who was left with the British army after the death of Lord Raglan, he was destined to be passed over by two men, who, however excellent as men of business, or as copious letter writers, were immeasurably his inferiors.10
Despite this alleged establishment conspiracy, Campbell ‘came out of the war with [an] untarnished reputation’, reported the Glasgow Herald, ‘and when we had to seek for a General equal to the great necessity of the Indian Mutiny, no voice hesitated to applaud the appointment of Sir Colin Campbell’.11
On the day of the funeral, crowds lined the streets ‘such as one would have seen on the occasion of a State funeral of the greatest in the land’, reported The Times:
There were those, no doubt, who were attracted solely by curiosity and by the desire to see a line of carriages and horses but besides, there stood in that people’s guard assembled to do honour to the soldier, many an old moustache who saluted as the hearse bore all that remained of the fiery centurion of the Peninsula and of the conqueror of India.12
Being late summer, the royal family were in the country, but the carriages of Queen Victoria, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, and the Prince of Wales, all in full mourning drapes, attended as proxies. Fourteen more carriages of mourners followed. Inside were the Duke of Wellington,* a marquess, three earls, one viscount, sundry military top brass and the editor of The Times. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, William Gladstone, sent his son to represent him. The renowned war correspondent, William Russell, who had accompanied Campbell through two campaigns, was despatched to cover the event.
Once the eulogies had been delivered, the strains of Purcell and Handel had died away and the sub-dean had finished speaking, the coffin was lowered into a vault in the nave, and this matter-of-fact epitaph placed on top:
Beneath this stone
Rest the remains of
Colin Campbell, Lord Clyde,
Who, by his own deserts,
Through fifty years of arduous service,
From the earliest battles in the Peninsular War
To the Pacification of India in 1858,
Rose to the rank of Field Marshal and the Peerage.
He died lamented
By the Queen, the army, and the people,
14th August 1863,
In the 71st year of his age
The question remains, how much truth lies beneath this tide of hyperbole?
* The 2nd Duke of Wellington, son of Arthur Wellesley, the Iron Duke.
1 Glasgow Herald, 17 August 1863.
2 Birmingham Daily Post, 24 August 1863.
3 Hansard/HC/Deb.8/2/58.Vol. 148, cc. 865–932.
4 Glasgow Herald, 15 August 1863.
5 Glasgow Herald, 15 August 1863.
6 Daily News, 15 August 1863.
7 The Times, 24 August 1863.
8 Glasgow Herald, 15 August 1863.
9 Morning Post, 22 August 1863.
10 Daily News, 15 August 1863.
11 Glasgow Herald, 17 August 1863.
12 The Times, 24 August 1863.