Clearly the Quartermaster had come upon one of those sensible and commonplace clergy whom Wellington had requisitioned from the Chaplain-general’s department, when he wanted an Evangelist who would have preached to him Justification by Faith in its simplest form.
There are a good many humorous anecdotes concerning the race of Chaplains preserved in the Peninsular diaries, not for the most part imputing to them any serious moral failing—though several are accused of having become “Belemites,”[331] and of shirking the front—but tending to prove that they often failed to rise to the occasion in their difficult calling. This was indeed to be expected when most of them had not the least knowledge of military life and customs, and were wandering about for many months in a world quite new to them. Clearly only men of experience should have been sent—but (as Wellington remarks in one of his letters) the pay offered was so small that only enthusiasts or very poor men could be expected to take it—and enthusiasts, for other reasons, the commander-in-chief did not like. The soldier seems often to have been struck by the helplessness of the chaplain—he let himself be robbed by his servants, wandered outside the picquets and got captured by the French, or was deceived by obvious hypocrites. There is one ridiculous story of a young clergyman who, when first brought forward to take a brigade Sunday service, and placed behind the big-drum, which was to serve him as a sort of central mark, mistook its function for that of a pulpit, and endeavoured to mount upon it, with disastrous results, and to the infinite laughter of the congregation.
The Methodists
Not unfrequently the chaplains fell out with the Methodists among their flocks. They had been specially imported by Wellington in order that they might discourage the prayer meetings—“getting up little conventicles” as one of them called these assemblies. “The Church service is sufficient for the instruction of mankind,” said another, and “the zeal for preaching” tended to self-sufficiency and incipient pharisaism. On the whole, however, there was no regular or normal opposition between Church of England and Methodist soldiers; they were in such a minority among the godless that it would have been absurd for them to have quarrelled. The Methodists regularly received the sacrament from the chaplains along with the churchmen, and the latter were frequently to be found at the prayer meetings of the former.
Sergeant Stevenson’s memoir, a mine of useful information in this respect, informs us that the regular organized prayer meeting of the Wesleyans in the 1st Division was begun in a gravel-pit just outside the walls of Badajoz, in September, 1809, and never ceased from that time forward. During the long sojourn behind the Lines of Torres Vedras it was held for many weeks in a large wine-press, holding more than a hundred men, behind the village of Cartaxo, quite close to Wellington’s headquarters, where indeed the hymns sung could be clearly heard. There were similar associations in other divisions, some mainly Church of England, some (as in the 79th regiment) Presbyterian. Stevenson says that he never heard of any opposition on the part of commanding officers, save in the case of one captain, whose preaching was finally ended by a course of persecution on the part of his colonel. But of course the “saints” had to endure a good deal of ridicule from their comrades, more especially those of them who took occasion to testify against drunkenness or blasphemy. Stevenson gives a verse of his own, which he says that he pasted up in the sergeants’ room of the 3rd Guards, to discourage profane swearing at large.
“It chills the blood to hear the Blest Supreme
Rashly appealed to on each trifling theme,
Maintain your rank: vulgarity despise;
To swear is neither brave, polite, nor wise.”
We may observe a certain canny appeal to the self-respect of the non-commissioned officer, in the insinuation that by blasphemy he lowers himself to the ranks, and is guilty of vulgarity and want of politeness. It is to be feared that these couplets might have been not inappropriately hung up in the mess rooms of certain regiments whose colonels were by no means choice in their language.
Soldier-Parsons
Among the senior officers of the Peninsular Army there were a good number who were not merely like Wellington, conformists of an official sort, but zealous Christians, such were Hill, Le Marchant,[332] Colborne, and John Beckwith—the Light Division colonel, who devoted his later years to taking care of the Waldenses of Piedmont, among whom he settled down in the evening of his life. Quite a sprinkling of the younger officers took orders when the war was over, after the great disbandment of 1816–17, when all the second battalions were disembodied. Such were three men who have left us excellent Peninsular diaries, Gleig of the 85th, the author of “The Subaltern,” and other works, afterwards Chaplain-General to the forces; Dallas, who made a great name as an evangelist at Burford, was another soldier-parson; Boothby, who wrote a good journal concerning Maida, Corunna, and Talavera, was a third. The type generally ran to strong Evangelicalism, as was natural, considering that this was the really live and vigorous element in the Church of that day.
It is clear that the religious condition of regiments varied extremely—that in some the influence of serious and devout officers and men was large, in others practically invisible. The character of the colonel made some difference for good or bad, but I imagine that more depended on the existence or non-existence of some small knot of officers or sergeants who did not fear to let their views be known, and formed a nucleus around which steady men gathered. Their names are mostly forgotten, the record of their witnessing has perished, or emerges only in some obscure corner of a little-read biography or an old religious magazine. I could wish that some sympathetic hand could devote a whole book to collecting and recording that which I have only been able to touch upon in this short chapter. It is a side of the life of the Peninsular Army which well deserves recording, since without some notice of it the picture of military society during the great war is wholly incomplete.