murder of the present Tsar’s father; his abduction of a lady from a harem near Jaipur; or his tête-à-tête with Napoleon Buonaparte, in a Paris prison from which he subsequently escaped, in lowering himself through a series of drains—but I had not come to Chizzlewit’s chambers solely to indulge in memory. Lord Harold was killed in the autumn of 1808, and if memory served, he had been much taken up with government policy at that time, being newly returned from the Peninsula. George Canning had then held the Foreign Ministry, and Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh, the Ministry of War. Lord Harold must certainly have been acquainted intimately with both.
The journal I sought was a slim one bound in bottle-green calf, the chronicle of the Rogue’s final year—begun in January of 1808 and ending abruptly with the first few days of November. I skimmed rapidly through several passages; his lordship had been writing from Oporto. The relevant entries spanned several months.
… unfortunate that Gustavus IV should be quite mad, as he is the sole ally on which His Majesty may depend in the region of the Baltic… my man writes from St. Petersburg of the Tsar’s threats to our Swedish King, to suggest that if Gustavus prefers to keep Finland, he had much better join with Russia and drive Britain out of these waters …
… seems clear that our intelligence of the Tsar’s intentions is wide of the mark. I cannot make out why the reports I obtain are so transparent on the matter, and those that Castlereagh reads directly contradict them … Thornton signs his treaty in Stockholm, and two weeks later Russian troops cross the Finnish border … there is duplicity in all this.
Castlereagh’s ten thousand men are sailing north to Gothenburg, with no clear orders and no one but Sir John Moore to save them … he is to defer to a mad king, who wishes to use British troops to seize Zealand from the Danes …
… I am sick at heart that when we most need troops here in Portugal and Spain, they are sent on a fool’s errand instead, to bait the Baltic tiger … I cannot make my voice heard in Canning’s ministry … he is all for helping the Spaniards to help themselves, but ordnance and funds are lacking … here, where we most require troops to face Marshal Junot, our attention is divided. Do we fight Napoleon, or the Tsar?
… Moira tells me of disputes between Canning and Castlereagh, and fears it will end badly… Canning is everywhere known to be less of a gentleman than Robert, and it is not to be wondered at, his father dead in his infancy and his mother upon the stage, the kept mistress of a dozen men—but one would have thought he would learn loyalty during his days at Oxford …
… this abortive campaign shall be adjudged a failure of Castlereagh’s, and a discomfiture to Portland’s government …
I could make little of all this; the web of policy, again, too entangled to comprehend. Certainly the abortive defence of Sweden had been followed by the even more ignominious expedition to Walcheren, an island in the Scheldt, which Lord Harold had not lived to see—forty thousand troops, thirty-five ships of the line, more than two hundred smaller vessels, and very little to show for it, while behind our backs, the French arrogantly installed Buonaparte’s brother on the throne of Spain. Again, the pressing need to crush the Enemy in the Peninsula had given way to a fool’s errand in the northern seas. Lord Harold was clearly disturbed by a discrepancy in intelligence— but he wrote to himself in these pages, as a man does when he ruminates upon anxieties in his mind: elliptical and reflective, without the need for explanation. Not for the first time, I wished acutely for his living presence.
One name, however, had leapt out at me from the journal’s pages: Moira. Lord Harold had known Henry’s intimate friend, the debt-ridden Earl. I should have expected it; both men had been bred up as Whigs from infancy.
The
The journal I sought was a slim one bound in bottle-green calf, the chronicle of the Rogue’s final year—begun in January of 1808 and ending abruptly with the first few days of November. I skimmed rapidly through several passages; his lordship had been writing from Oporto. The relevant entries spanned several months.
… unfortunate that Gustavus IV should be quite mad, as he is the sole ally on which His Majesty may depend in the region of the Baltic… my man writes from St. Petersburg of the Tsar’s threats to our Swedish King, to suggest that if Gustavus prefers to keep Finland, he had much better join with Russia and drive Britain out of these waters …
… seems clear that our intelligence of the Tsar’s intentions is wide of the mark. I cannot make out why the reports I obtain are so transparent on the matter, and those that Castlereagh reads directly contradict them … Thornton signs his treaty in Stockholm, and two weeks later Russian troops cross the Finnish border … there is duplicity in all this.
Castlereagh’s ten thousand men are sailing north to Gothenburg, with no clear orders and no one but Sir John Moore to save them … he is to defer to a mad king, who wishes to use British troops to seize Zealand from the Danes …
… I am sick at heart that when we most need troops here in Portugal and Spain, they are sent on a fool’s errand instead, to bait the Baltic tiger … I cannot make my voice heard in Canning’s ministry … he is all for helping the Spaniards to help themselves, but ordnance and funds are lacking … here, where we most require troops to face Marshal Junot, our attention is divided. Do we fight Napoleon, or the Tsar?
… Moira tells me of disputes between Canning and Castlereagh, and fears it will end badly… Canning is everywhere known to be less of a gentleman than Robert, and it is not to be wondered at, his father dead in his infancy and his mother upon the stage, the kept mistress of a dozen men—but one would have thought he would learn loyalty during his days at Oxford …
… this abortive campaign shall be adjudged a failure of Castlereagh’s, and a discomfiture to Portland’s government …
I could make little of all this; the web of policy, again, too entangled to comprehend. Certainly the abortive defence of Sweden had been followed by the even more ignominious expedition to Walcheren, an island in the Scheldt, which Lord Harold had not lived to see—forty thousand troops, thirty-five ships of the line, more than two hundred smaller vessels, and very little to show for it, while behind our backs, the French arrogantly installed Buonaparte’s brother on the throne of Spain. Again, the pressing need to crush the Enemy in the Peninsula had given way to a fool’s errand in the northern seas. Lord Harold was clearly disturbed by a discrepancy in intelligence— but he wrote to himself in these pages, as a man does when he ruminates upon anxieties in his mind: elliptical and reflective, without the need for explanation. Not for the first time, I wished acutely for his living presence.
One name, however, had leapt out at me from the journal’s pages: Moira. Lord Harold had known Henry’s intimate friend, the debt-ridden Earl. I should have expected it; both men had been bred up as Whigs from infancy.
The
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