Rifles - Mark Urban [116]
As the winter wore on, the initial mess conversation about leaving Madrid or Wellington’s intemperate General Order gave way to a more sensitive kind of discussion, lubricated by many bottles of Douro, concerning the divisions within the English-speaking nation itself: between Englishman and American, Protestant and Catholic. Among these prickly, dangerous fellows, these were tricky subjects. Things were made all the more difficult by the fact that certain Scottish officers took the Tory part in these debates, doing so with the apparent backing of Colonel Cameron.
Lieutenant Willie Johnston, having returned from his Badajoz sick leave with his right arm shattered, became a leading light in these proceedings. According to John Kincaid, Johnston was ‘the most ultra of all ultra-Tories … many of his warmest friends were Irish, but as a nation he held them cheap, and made no secret of his opinions’. Kincaid’s prejudices had shown themselves too, for example in his treatment of Sarsfield, whom he described as having ‘the usual sinister cast of the eye worn by common Irish country countenances’. In an attempt to pacify the Irish and buy off those who might otherwise be tempted to repeat the rising of 1798, the ministry scattered patronage liberally about the island. Commissions in the Army were part of this effort, and evidently the Sarsfields of this world were considered by some to be far too vulgar to act the part of gentleman, rightful holder of the King’s Commission. The Scots, by contrast, had atoned for their own 1745 rebellion with such zealous military service to George III that many officers from north of the Tweed considered themselves to be loyalists par excellence. Had an O’Hare or a Uniacke overheard the Irish disparaged by Johnston or Kincaid, there is no telling what the result might have been, but they were both dead, and MacDiarmid, the other Irish captain in the battalion, had been packed off home that summer with Sarsfield.
Just before Christmas, Johnston was appointed to the captaincy left vacant by Crampton’s death. There was nothing outrageous in this, for Johnston was high on the seniority list of lieutenants and had shown himself as brave as any man, having volunteered for both Rodrigo and Badajoz. Along with Kincaid’s nomination to the adjutancy, however, this decision served to convince certain observers that Cameron conformed to Dr Johnson’s stereotype of the Scot, as one who would advance his people ahead of others. This left lasting rancour, John FitzMaurice’s son noting years later that his father’s ‘prejudice against the Scots was caused by what he considered the injustice of a Scotch colonel … who never lost an opportunity of favouring his own countrymen at the expense of English and Irish officers’.
It was just as well for the regiment that FitzMaurice remained on sick leave until early 1813, for he was the type who might easily have called out some Scot who gave a little too freely of his views about the Irish and their base qualities. But he was not there, for most of the winter at least, and any young Irish subaltern who considered settling matters with a Johnston or a Kincaid would have had to consider his position very carefully. To get away with duelling, one needed a powerful patron, just as Beckwith had saved Jonathan Layton from the consequences of killing Captain Grant in 1808. But a captain called out by a subaltern might, in the words of another Rifles officer, ‘take advantage of his superior rank, not only to decline giving me that satisfaction, but report me, thus destroying my prospects for life’.
Gairdner thus felt himself oppressed and alone, resorting to writing his misery in code – to stop others reading it – in his journal: ‘Although the regimental mess has been the means of our living much better than we could have