Ashore in the streets of Portsea, old salts who had fought with Vernon when he took Porto Bello, are to be met with any day of the week. You may come across, indeed, an occasional old fellow who can remember Benbow, and how the news first came to England of the taking of Gibraltar. And sitting at his door on a sunny morning you may yet find an old Portsmouth grandsire here and there who can carry his memory further back still, and tell you how the bonfires blazed in High Street in honour of the battle of La Hogue.
Turn away now from the harbour and the Hard and take a short walk through the streets of Portsmouth town. Soldiers in the uniform that Corporal John’s men wore at Blenheim and Ramillies, rub shoulders with you every hour of the day. Some are for Canada, some for the West Indies, some for Northern Germany. All are passing through Portsmouth on the way to the great depôt camp in the Isle of Wight where the troops for oversea service assemble. Most are men of the foot regiments, with long-skirted red coats, red waistcoats, and red breeches with high white gaiters. Some wear the big cocked hat that came in with George the First; others the tall sugar-loaf grenadier cap of the Prussian pattern. Those with buff facings are “Howard’s” men; those with yellow facings, “Kingsley’s”; those with willow green, “Rufane’s”; those with blue, “Duroure’s.” For six or seven years past our regiments have had numbers, but the men still hold to the old way, and each regiment calls itself for preference according to the custom of the army for these eighty years past. Now and then a party of dragoons pass through the streets, red coated and wearing black leather fur-crested helmets and long jack-boots. These come from one of the cavalry camps at Chichester or Southampton. Occasionally, too, cocked-hatted artillerymen are to be met with, in blue coats with red waistcoats and breeches and white gaiters.
Batches of men of the standing garrison of the Fortress of Portsmouth, the “Royal Invalids,” as the corps they belong to is called, are to be seen about the streets at all hours; veterans drafted from off the Chelsea Hospital out-pension list as being sufficiently able-bodied for home-service fortress duty, old war-worn warriors bearing scars, many of them got in action at Dettingen and Fontenoy.
A Portsmouth visitor would certainly, too, have seen in and about the town a personage of some notoriety in those times: Governor Hawley, Commandant of the Garrison, the Duke of Cumberland’s hard-riding, hard-drinking friend. “Bloody Hawley” was what the soldiers called him, taking the sobriquet from the name that years before the hapless clansmen of the north gave the man who led “Butcher” Cumberland’s dragoons in the merciless chase after Culloden. In General Hawley you would have seen perhaps as badly hated an officer as ever held a King of England’s commission. “Chief Justice Hawley” the rank and file also called him: and the reason for it any one would have seen for himself by walking round Governor’s Green any day of the week, or passing beyond the postern and strolling out across the Portsmouth ramparts to the glacis on an execution morning.
The talk of the place—and of all England too at the moment—is of a French invasion.
England, in 1758, had not yet recovered from her last bad fit of nerves, brought on by truculent vapourings from Versailles at the outset of the Seven Years’ War. Government was urgently pushing on arrangements for forming an efficient militia force to fill the place of the regular battalions fighting abroad in Germany and in America, in view of the invasion scare that was threatening in the near future. Already reports had come to hand from France of the building of flat-bottomed beach-boats and preparations for large encampments next summer in the vicinity of the French Channel ports—at Dunkirk and Calais, Havre and St. Malo, and in Lower Brittany on the shores of Quiberon Bay. In every county of England and Wales the local authorities were getting ready for the early muster of the new militia levies—now, for the first time in our history, to be formed into regiments. Along the coasts of Sussex and Kent, from Selsea to beyond Dungeness and Hythe, where the open coast-line might seem to invite attack—at Littlehampton, Brighton, Blatchington, Seaford, Hastings, Rye, Hythe, Folkestone—the sites for four- and six-gun batteries were being pegged out by military engineers, to be thrown up by local labourers under expert supervision. At every point along the seashore from Spurn Head to the Lizard the beacons were being watched night and day, while the local authorities of every seaboard district had standing orders to be ready, on the first alarm of a hostile landing, to transport the women and children in farm carts to the nearest towns, and drive inland the horses and sheep and cattle.
We have to turn over many pages of the world’s history to get to the year that saw the Victory brought into the British Navy. The Seven Years’ War itself, the exigencies of which called the Victory into existence, is nowadays but a schoolbook term. Frederick the Great, in the year that the Victory first figures in the Navy Estimates, was the man of the hour. Peter the Great’s daughter ruled in Russia. The “Old Pretender”—the “warming-pan baby” of Whitehall, of the year 1688—was still alive, dragging out his last years in Rome as a pensioner of the Pope. Captain Cook was as yet an unknown master’s mate, serving on board a man-of-war away across the Atlantic with Boscawen. Nelson, as has been said, was a long-clothes baby; Napoleon and Wellington were not yet born. The Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, Viscount Ligonier, was a French Huguenot refugee, born a subject of the Grand Monarque, who first saw war under Marlborough at Blenheim. Wolfe was an unheard of Major-General, nearly at the bottom of the list. News of Clive’s victory at Plassey had not long reached England. The elder Pitt, “the Great Commoner,” had only been in power for little over a twelvemonth. William Pitt was not yet born. Smeaton was building the Eddystone Lighthouse. James Watt was a Glasgow mathematical instrument maker, his ideas about steam hardly yet in embryo. Burke was a young Irishman in London, making a poor living out of essays for Grub Street magazines. Lord Chesterfield was still writing his letters. Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary was a new book, being advertised in publishers’ announcements, in two bulky quarto volumes at £4. 10s. Garrick was playing nightly at Drury Lane.
It was still the custom at Bath to announce the arrival of lords and ladies and “nabobs” with peals on the Abbey bells and serenadings by the Assembly band. Brighton was hardly on the map as yet; it was merely Brighthelmstone, a Sussex fishing village, just beginning to be visited for sea bathing by the handful of people who had heard of it through Dr. Russell’s pamphlets. Old London Bridge still had houses on it. Traffic in imported merchandise throughout the country was still carried on by pack-horse. One coach—or “machine”—a month, ran between London and Edinburgh, and took a fortnight on the road. A similar conveyance between London and Portsmouth took, under the most favourable conditions, two whole days. The mails went by postboy, and hardly a week passed without people failing to get their letters, because the local postboy had been stopped by a highwayman. Gibbets, indeed, with the bleached bones of these gentry in chains, stood on every main road out of London. Pirates were still from time to time publicly borne from the Old Bailey down the Thames in boats, heavily chained, to be hanged at Execution Dock and gibbeted at Galleons Point—on the average half a dozen a year. Just as the Admiralty draughtsmen were outlining the plans of the Victory, the news of the hour for nine people out of ten in England was the committal of Eugene Aram to York Castle for the murder of Daniel Clark.