On 26 June 1815, just over a week after Waterloo, Daniel Sykes, a Yorkshire lawyer and businessman, wrote to his sister, Marianne. Recent events in Belgium clearly perplexed him. ‘I cannot help giving vent to my quakerish Horror of war and lamenting that thousands upon thousands of human beings should be slaughtered to settle the Question, (to me an indifferent one) who is to be the monarch of France’, he reflected. ‘These splendid victories do more to demoralize the world than all the exertions of Philosophers Legislators and Divines can effect toward the improvement of it for Centuries to come.’ ‘Every pursuit that is calmly beneficent; every endeavour to improve or embellish Society’, he went on, ‘all fade before the blazing glory of the successful Warrior. I hope none of your Boys will ever follow the profession of a legalized Murderer. But enough of this disgusting subject.’Footnote 1 Sykes's fastidiousness was understandable: he was a humanitarian, who as MP for Kingston-upon-Hull voted against naval impressment and flogging, opposed slavery, and considered Catholic emancipation overdue.Footnote 2 Marianne had married the banker and MP Henry Thornton, one of the leading evangelical spokesmen at Westminster. Sykes was thus part of the extended cousinhood surrounding William Wilberforce, that earnest group of philanthropists and politicians known to their contemporaries as the ‘Saints’ and to us as the ‘Clapham Sect’.Footnote 3 Then, as now, they were not a group known for their bellicosity. Wilberforce famously broke with his friend Pitt in 1794 over continuation of the war against France, voting for peace and telling friends that he was revolted by those who toasted ‘death to the French’.Footnote 4
In July 1815, however, Sykes was swimming against the tide. Even the pacific Wilberforce hailed ‘the Duke of Wellington's splendid victory’.Footnote 5 Indeed, as this article will show, most evangelicals cheered the progress of the war. They took part in it too, to an extent that is not always appreciated. Sykes, for instance, might have forgotten that Henry, his recently deceased brother-in-law, had once been a captain in the Battersea and Streatham Volunteers, but it cannot have passed him by that one of Marianne's nephews, Samuel, was midshipman on board a crack frigate, the Phoebe.Footnote 6 The spread of the new religiosity among the professional classes, moreover, meant that Thornton junior would have encountered plenty of other officers who saw no contradiction in combining piety with professionalism: his captain, the celebrated Sir James Hillyar, was a case in point. Even Nelson, Britain's supreme martial talisman, was remembered for his religious sincerity. If gossip tarnished his posthumous halo, writers continued to rhapsodize about a hero who had made his fleet pray before battles.Footnote 7 Wellington did not parade his piety, but at Waterloo, too, there were ‘zealous Christians’ among his leading officers. His most trusted general, Rowland Hill, came from a flamboyantly religious family. His uncles were notorious, Sir Richard as an outspoken MP and Rowland as an eccentric preacher, but their nephew too was held up by his biographer as a man of ardent if private faith.Footnote 8 Colonel Sir John Colborne, the tall, blond, talented commander of the 52nd Regiment, which turned the battle, was known for his religiosity, while the intrepid J. C. Beckwith of the 95th threw himself into post-war missionary work among the Waldensians in Italy.Footnote 9
Nevertheless, it was the navy rather than the army that occupied evangelical attention. In part, this was because they had built up a strong position of influence within it: Lord Barham and his nephew Gambier were intimates of Wilberforce and had dominated naval administration in the 1780s and 1790s and the Admiralty, too, in the mid-1800s.Footnote 10 More important, however, were a string of eye-catching victories at sea during the same period. Like everyone else, pious readers devoured reports about campaigns, lionized successful commanders and participated avidly in what has been labelled ‘victory culture’: the illuminations, subscriptions, print media, and martial fashions that attended naval successes. Their fascination, though, was about more than just following the vogue.Footnote 11 ‘Victory culture’ was so vibrant precisely because it was contested, because it allowed rival groups to gloss their sectional aspirations as patriotic endeavours that ought to command universal support.Footnote 12 This article will contend that evangelicals bought so wholeheartedly into it because it allowed them to harness favourable associations and images for new ends. The equation of maritime power with Protestantism and patriotic sentiment in eighteenth-century Britain was highly significant. For whereas memories of the Commonwealth period continued to render standing armies unpalatable, the navy had long basked in its reputation as a bulwark against continental Catholic despotism. In earlier wars, victorious admirals like Vernon and Rodney were feted by xenophobic patriots eager to claim that God was Protestant.Footnote 13 These associations still carried ideological punch in the 1790s, when the struggle against atheistic France became a holy war.Footnote 14 Growing concern for the morals of servicemen was one consequence, as Michael Snape and Richard Blake have shown.Footnote 15 This article builds on that scholarship, but seeks to make a different point: that war was also a catalyst for changes in how civilian religious culture dealt with masculinity and the issues surrounding it. In 1971, Olive Anderson published a seminal article describing how evangelical propagandists during the Crimean War and Indian Mutiny wrote military memoirs pushing the idea that the truest Christians were also the best soldiers.Footnote 16 Scholarship since then, however, has revealed the roots of ‘Christian militarism’ in eighteenth-century debates about the compatibility of religion and ‘benevolence’ with military spirit and love of one's country.Footnote 17 What follows focuses on individual heroism in the decades either side of 1800, arguing that heroes raised fundamental issues about the effects of religion on military masculinity and vice versa, issues that religious people in general and evangelicals in particular felt forced to address in order to demonstrate the utility of their beliefs.
This has crucial consequences for our understanding of how the evangelical party and the ideas they championed became so prominent in late Hanoverian politics and public life. As M. J. D. Roberts has observed regarding the reformation of manners movement, and Christopher Leslie Brown regarding abolitionism, evangelicals were quick to forge alliances with existing philanthropic causes and to clad their concerns in the newly fashionable language of patriotism.Footnote 18 War allowed them to convince people that revival was a matter not just of individual belief but of national morality. Yet to see this as mere tactical positioning is to miss the point. Nor were evangelicals passive onlookers on a pageant of state-sponsored patriotic masculinity, as Holger Hoock implies they were.Footnote 19 In the 1780s and early 1790s, evangelical causes and concerns certainly overlapped with those of other moral crusaders, just as they did in the later 1790s and 1800s with those keen to bolster the political status quo, and later on with the celebration of British success. But their aims cannot simply be folded into stories of ‘reform’, or ‘conservatism’, or ‘patriotism’. They had ambitions of their own and, increasingly, the means and methods through which to pursue them. What follows, then, argues that they embraced martial valour in order to mould it to their own ends. In so doing, they advanced a powerful providential narrative in which Christian heroes and godly policy were what made Britain great, a narrative whose veracity was seemingly ‘proven’ by military success, and which would be highly influential both during and after the war.
I
Religion was central to processes of ideological mobilization during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.Footnote 20 Clergymen across Europe expended prodigious energy blessing flags, acting as chaplains and exhorting nations to holy war, not just against the Napoleonic regime but also for it: in France, Belgium, and the Rhineland, priests were enlisted as ‘mayors in black’, some becoming pulpit cheerleaders for ‘St Napoleon’ and teaching that desertion was a mortal sin.Footnote 21 More significant, perhaps, was the place of religion in movements of counter-revolutionary reaction. In Spain, Italy, and Russia, the defence of Mother Church made war into a crusade, while in Prussia, Calvinists, Lutherans, Catholics, and Jews were placed under the control of the Kultusministerium in order to subserve the needs of the warfare state.Footnote 22 In Britain, too, the churches were drawn into the struggle. Confessional differences faded in the face of a common enemy: Anglican, Catholic, Methodist, and dissenting pulpits alike thundered with invectives against godless Jacobinism, and official fast and thanksgiving days were widely observed.Footnote 23 While the details were contentious, there was a widespread and growing sense of the need for religious and moral rejuvenation. Among evangelicals, this mood was pronounced: the minutes of the Eclectic Society, a group of like-minded London clergymen, leave no doubt as to the eschatological urgency that military failure and invasion scares lent to moral campaigners.Footnote 24 Their pulpit jeremiads during the crises of 1794–6, 1797–1802, and 1803–5 resounded with the rhetoric of impending judgement.Footnote 25 ‘Every man, now-a-days, is an Amos or a Malachi’, sneered the whig churchman Sydney Smith. ‘One rushes out of his chambers, and tells us we are beaten by the French, because we do not abolish the slave trade. Another assures us, that we have no chance of victory until India is evangelized.’Footnote 26
Anxiety about whether or not Britain deserved to win the war meant that victories and defeats were symbolically freighted. Military actions had always been regarded as barometer readings for divine favour or disfavour, often being tied closely to the notion that Britain was a ‘Protestant Israel’ with concomitant privileges. Footnote 27 This time, however, the biblical parallel was not with Israel's faith but her lack of it. ‘Considering our advantages we are worse than any nation under the sun’, commented the Eclectic and reformed slave trader John Newton gloomily.Footnote 28 Attention focused especially closely on the war at sea. Amid reverses and withdrawals on mainland Europe, triumphs at the Glorious First of June (1794), St Vincent and Camperdown (both 1797), the Nile (1798), and at Copenhagen and the Straits (both 1801) gave people something to cheer about. Evangelicals exulted especially loudly at the acknowledgement of divine interposition in admirals’ despatches, which, although conventional, now took on new significance. ‘I think Lord Nelson's letter has produced a disposition to speak more of Providence’, rejoiced Wilberforce following the victory at the Nile.Footnote 29 To another correspondent, he pronounced himself ‘almost as much delighted with Nelson's letter as with the victory itself’.Footnote 30 The thanksgiving sermon of Thomas Scott, another Eclectic, contrasted this with French attempts to curry favour in Egypt by keeping ‘Mohammedan festivals’, chortling that they now blamed ‘the destinies’ and complained that ‘Fortune’ had abandoned them.Footnote 31 Trafalgar elicited a rash of similar comparisons. ‘What a perfect contrast to the vain glorious bulletins of Buonaparte!’ exclaimed Venn on reading Lord Collingwood's despatch, sentiments that were echoed throughout the religious press.Footnote 32 Or, as another cleric put it, ‘I wish that some of our admirals were made bishops’, adding, mischievously, that he ‘could not wish that any of our bishops were made admirals – unless yellow ones [i.e. retired].’Footnote 33 Evangelicals made much of the elevation of Barham (‘who, we know, prays for the success of his measures’) to the Admiralty in the months before Trafalgar.Footnote 34
Yet if naval victories gave evangelicals opportunities to present a providential spin on Britain's crisis, they also raised new difficulties. For although Nelson provided excuses to talk about providence, he was at best a problematic figure. Rumours about Lady Hamilton were impossible to gloss over, and public adulation for him rendered this all the more painful. The naval-officer-turned-clergyman Richard Marks suspected that sailors trusted Nelson more than God, and said so in scalding terms.Footnote 35 For the redoubtable Hannah More, the obsequies following Nelson's death exceeded all just bounds. ‘It is not a funeral, but an apotheosis’, she fumed privately. ‘However it will I hope encourage other great men to be shot.’Footnote 36 Richard Cecil, minister of fashionable St John's Chapel, Bedford Row, was more temperate, extolling Nelson's skill and commending the Patriotic Fund to his hearers. But Cecil was at pains to emphasize that the fallen hero had been only a man who, like everyone else, would one day stand before his maker. Yesterday, he was Britain's bulwark, ‘his very name a host!’; then ‘a single bullet lays him dead! And the next we see of him, is his corpse carried in procession through the streets to his long home! What is life!’ Mourning Britons, he underlined, ought not to forget that it was God who had chosen their darling as an instrument for punishing Britain's enemies.Footnote 37
While other clergymen threw themselves wholeheartedly into the deification of Nelson, such comments evince a mounting unease regarding the developing patriotic cult of the hero, a cult symbolized strikingly in the conversion of St Paul's Cathedral into a ‘Temple of British Fame’ from the late 1790s onwards.Footnote 38 The setting provided a Christian veneer, but as Holger Hoock has shown, the statuary and language used to commemorate the glorious dead remained resolutely classical.Footnote 39 While some observers found the ‘pagan’ iconography of the St Paul's pantheon distastefully unBritish, for evangelicals it was the inscriptions proclaiming undying fame that were more pernicious.Footnote 40 ‘How mean are these ostentatious ways of bribing the Vote of Fame, and purchasing a little posthumous Renown!’ James Hervey had mused in his still widely read Meditations among the tombs (1746).Footnote 41 ‘What heaps of unmeaning stone and marble!’ Wesley exclaimed after a walk around Westminster Abbey.Footnote 42
One way of countering this was to advance alternative models. Sir Samuel Romilly's famous 1807 parliamentary eulogy contrasting the bloody pomp and pride of Napoleon's conquests with the humanity of Wilberforce's abolitionism captivated a generation of pious commentators, who presented the latter as the moral counterweight who had tipped the wartime balance Britain's way.Footnote 43 Overt comparisons between servicemen and other brands of hero also came to pervade Church Missionary Society (CMS) sermons in the 1800s.Footnote 44 Instead of a marble slab in St Paul's, declaimed one preacher, ‘soldiers of the cross’ killed in action would receive a ‘martyr's crown’: ‘In comparison…how poor is it, to fall, like Nelson, in the arms of Victory – covered with stars, and laurels, and honourable wounds; and to be embalmed by a nation's tears!’Footnote 45 As a call for volunteers to proselytize abroad, this was not instantly successful, but it underlines the extent to which militaristic rhetoric and images preoccupied evangelicals. What they really wanted, of course was the best of both worlds: men who embodied their ideals of religiosity and regard for providence while also winning battles. But where were they to be found? And what might they look like?
II
These questions were by no means new. As Jeremy Gregory has shown, the early modern idea of the ‘godly man’ who also participated fully in society continued to shape debates throughout the long eighteenth century.Footnote 46 One of the most widely read texts that tackled military questions was Richard Steele's The Christian hero: an argument proving that no principles but those of religion are sufficient to make a great man, first published in 1701. ‘Why is it’, asked Steele, ‘that the heathen struts, and the Christian sneaks, in our imagination?’Footnote 47 Rejecting classical figures, and taking Christ and Paul as his exemplars, he argued that faith was the only solid foundation for ideal male behaviour, which consisted in self-discipline, public duty, and magnanimity towards one's enemies.Footnote 48 Steele's shift away from brute strength, hardihood, and martial courage was deeply significant. By 1820, the Christian Hero had reached its twentieth edition and was still being read and quoted. Another who had advocated similar ideas was Jonas Hanway, a merchant and patriot-philanthropist whose Marine Society recruited and clothed volunteers and boys for naval service during the Seven Years' War. Against a background of debates about the ‘effeminizing’ effects of luxury, Hanway, too, pitted self-centred vanity and laziness against the self-forgetful manly patriotism and martial vigour that characterized the genuinely devout and therefore active Christian. ‘We are to behave, not as quakers, but as men.’Footnote 49 Hanway's ideal commander was one whose faith rendered him both patriotic and unafraid; a quasi-Christlike figure who would die for his men and for whom they might lay down their own lives in return.Footnote 50 Although, as Matthew McCormack has shown, virile, sexualized manliness was always likely to come to the fore in eighteenth-century conflicts, it was not the only mode of military masculinity on offer.Footnote 51
One who came to epitomize a different kind of heroism was Captain James Cook, whose exploratory voyages in 1768–71, 1772–5, and 1776–9 generated an extraordinary range of writing, plays, and painting. Kathleen Wilson has shown how his marriage of courage with humanitarianism and scientific endeavour gave him enormous appeal as ‘a new kind of national hero’ whose exploits appealed to those repelled by bloodthirsty militarism.Footnote 52 Evangelicals found him deeply fascinating. Missionary publicists like William Carey, Thomas Haweis, and George Burder exulted in the prospects for the gospel that accounts of Cook's travels opened up.Footnote 53 William Cowper (Charity, 1782) and Hannah More (Slavery, 1788) lauded him in poems that contrasted his enlightened approach to other races with the destruction that characterized the slave trade. Cook's stellar career, they asserted, was the result of ‘the remarkable interposition of providence’ in his favour.Footnote 54 Here, as elsewhere, of course, the argument came after the event: Cowper was one of many commentators convinced that Cook's tragic death stemmed from the withdrawal of divine approval when he ‘was content to be worshipped’ by idolatrous islanders.Footnote 55 At the very least, however, he had been an unwitting agent of providence, and evangelicals continued to esteem him as a paternal commander who put his men's welfare above his own fame and reaped semi-miraculous success as a result.Footnote 56
Proponents of these ideas had to fight hard to defend them. Defeat in America prompted calls for moral revival, but it also raised the possibility that it was in fact ‘effeminate’ religiosity that had sapped manly vigour.Footnote 57 Readers of Edward Gibbon's Decline and fall of the Roman empire (1776–88) could hardly have missed his remarks on the corrosive effects of Christianity on Roman manliness in the first volume; in the third, published in 1781, he blamed imperial collapse on ‘the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity’. The parallels with Britain's own travails were obvious. ‘The active virtues of society were discouraged’, he continued, ‘and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloyster.’Footnote 58 Naturally, Gibbon found ready answers among religious writers.Footnote 59 The model many had in mind was Colonel James Gardiner, a devout dragoon officer celebrated by the Independent minister Philip Doddridge in an extremely popular spiritual biography, Some remarkable passages in the life of the Honourable Col. James Gardiner (1747), which was republished or excerpted almost every year between 1776 and 1800, sometimes twice, and was still in print as late as 1864. Doddridge's Gardiner was the perfect paternal officer, encouraging his men to attend church, frowning on swearing, and tempering severity with sympathy: ‘he knew how to reconcile the tenderness of a real, faithful, and condescending friend, with the authority of a commander’.Footnote 60 Fervent faith did not mean that he was ill-bred; on the contrary, he was graceful and a good horseman.Footnote 61 Yet in covering Gardiner's flank against accusations of uncouth enthusiasm in the 1740s, Doddridge was unwittingly opening him to other lines of attack later on. By the 1790s, atrocities perpetrated by revolutionary France seemed to call for a more virile, victory-at-all-costs style of leadership. Gardiner was certainly brave, but he had perished in a losing cause, during the fiasco at Prestonpans in 1745. His sentimentalism now looked wimpish: would a ‘devout communicant’ whose ‘manly countenance’ softened to tears during communion be tough enough to take on the Jacobins?Footnote 62 Some suggested that war to the knife made moral qualms irrelevant, or even unhelpful: Lord Melville, for instance, informed the House of Lords in 1808 that ‘the worst men [were] the fittest soldiers’.Footnote 63
Those trying to redefine heroism at the turn of the century, then, inherited several interrelated strands of thought, not all of which were useful. Their problems were compounded by a shortage of useful exemplars: Doddridge's valorization of everyday virtues secured the success of Remarkable passages, but it was also penned by a champion of ‘family religion’, for whom Gardiner's profession was almost incidental, and who might well leave readers with the damaging impression that military culture and the practice of a living faith were mutually opposed.Footnote 64 The challenge, then, was clear. Without denying that Christians genuinely suffered for their faith, religious publicists had to show that it was not just compatible with professional competence but that it was a prudential choice for those hungry for success. This message was set forth vigorously in the burgeoning volumes of Sea sermons produced by naval chaplains and dockside clergymen, some but not all of whom were evangelical.Footnote 65 Idle readers might perhaps have paid more attention to Who fares best, the Christian or the man of the world? (1789) a pugnacious tract written by a Royal Marine officer arguing that rewards in heaven and plaudits on earth went together.Footnote 66 More widely disseminated and better developed was Thomas Gisborne's An enquiry into the duties of men (1794). Gisborne was a cultivated clergyman and university friend of Wilberforce, and his book showed middle-class males how to live out their beliefs in everyday existence, rebutting those who sneered that Christianity did not ‘inculcate patriotism in its followers’ by asserting that Christ's ministry had been one long example of patriotism in the face of his countrymen's ‘cruel usage’.Footnote 67 To naval and military officers, he recommended ‘uprightness and activity’, paternal care of subordinates, modesty, integrity, and forbearance towards foes. The golden thread running through it was heartfelt belief. ‘Religion is the only foundation of true courage’, Gisborne declared provocatively, ‘the only certain pledge for persevering fidelity in the path of military or naval duty.’ Having stated his point, however, Gisborne at once qualified it: specious bravado or desire for advancement, he conceded, might indeed sustain one for a time. He was well aware that belief did not guarantee success. Nevertheless, by insisting that the ‘genuine fortitude’ derived from faith was of a far superior kind, that only trust in God could bring cheerful submission to an unknown fate, Gisborne and others like him were subtly shifting the debate.Footnote 68
No doubt many professionals scoffed at advice from an evangelical landlubber from landlocked Staffordshire. Yet Gisborne was careful to acknowledge his sources, a naval captain recently rewarded ‘in the most public and distinguished manner’ and ‘an Officer of very high rank in his Majesty's Naval Service’.Footnote 69 The latter was Sir Charles Middleton, the future Lord Barham. The former was Middleton's nephew James Gambier, whose courageous conduct and almost reckless handling of HMS Defence at the Glorious First of June earlier the same year earned him a knighthood, a gold medal, and the approval of the king, not to mention inspiring a commemorative painting by Nicolas Pocock. Gambier was a disciplinarian who reproved swearing even in the heat of battle, held regular Sunday services in an age when this was not a given, and banned unmarried women from coming aboard, all of which earned him the unenviable nickname ‘Dismal Jimmy’.Footnote 70 Nevertheless, he provided valuable ammunition for evangelicals seeking to confound their detractors.
Before that memorable event, it was said in the fleet that the ‘Defence’ had too much preaching and praying on board ever to be much of a fighting ship…You have forced the admiration of that very fleet who threw out this reflection. And they are now convinced from you, that to serve God and their country are duties entirely compatible, and therefore ought to be inseparable.Footnote 71
Gambier was no Nelson, but neither was he a shrinking violet. In 1807, he commanded the naval component of the expedition to neutral Copenhagen, which returned with the Danish fleet in tow but left behind it over 2,000 dead civilians and a city devastated by calculated bombardment. Like many of his contemporaries, Gambier was troubled by the ruthlessness of the act: the king condemned it as ‘very immoral’, and although Wilberforce was eventually persuaded that it had been necessary, many of his friends were not.Footnote 72 Yet the peerage that followed prompted a familiar chorus of congratulations nonetheless. ‘I hope religion will no longer appear so formidable a thing to our great men, when they see that, so far from disqualifying persons from executing high and perilous offices properly, it inspires them with greater vigour and superior energy’, purred More. ‘How perfectly consistent true valour and magnanimity are with genuine piety and the strictest purity of manners’, added Bishop Porteus of London, presumably with a straight face.Footnote 73
The canard that ‘enthusiasm’ impaired fighting spirit was never entirely exploded. Gambier's posthumous reputation was and still is as an overcautious commander more at home in church than on the quarterdeck, an impression based almost entirely his final action, at the Basque Roads in 1809. Rumours abounded that he had busied himself marshalling his sailors for church parade, and at least one caricature pictured him droning though a psalm while the dashing young fire-eater Thomas Cochrane begged him in vain to capitalize on French confusion.Footnote 74 Truth be told, Cochrane was insufferably arrogant, and while the ensuing court-martial cleared Gambier of misconduct, the affair remains highly coloured by the former's self-aggrandizing Autobiography of a seaman (1860) and his numerous hagiographers. In evangelical circles, at least, the trial was seen as a successful vindication not just of Gambier's actions but of his beliefs: minutes taken by the shorthand writer and Bible Society activist W. B. Gurney were published shortly afterwards, while Wilberforce praised his friend as ‘a true specimen of Christian heroism’.Footnote 75 Perhaps, though, their concern was overdone. By this stage, there were plenty of others who exemplified practical but pious Christianity. The late Adam Duncan, hammer of the Dutch at Camperdown in 1797 and a committed Presbyterian, was still remembered for publicly falling to his knees in prayer at the moment of victory.Footnote 76 The devout Guernseyman Sir James Saumarez was known to combine Christian meekness with ‘the boldness of a lion whenever a sense of duty brings it into action’.Footnote 77 Saumarez's one-time flag-captain, Jahleel Brenton, was another who married deepening faith to fighting intrepidity, in 1810 praying before an action but also thrilling at a friend's Nelsonian exhortation: ‘now sir, here is victory or Westminster Abbey for you!’Footnote 78 In fact neither ensued, but Brenton's hip wound and his bravery secured him a 100 guinea sword from the Lloyd's Fund, a baronetcy, and a £300 pension.Footnote 79 Another favourite theme in pious journalism was Barham's success at the Admiralty; indeed, the biographer Edwin Sidney was still banging that drum in 1834: ‘let this for ever silence those who assert that religion incapacitates for the uses of this life’.Footnote 80
Sidney's precept was believable because it went with the grain of developments in the navy and in society at large. Success remained the hero's chief qualification. But despite the death-or-glory sloganizing, it was no longer enough to be merely courageous: the ideal officer needed also to demonstrate his intellectual and emotional leadership; to care for his men as well as commanding them. Excessive punishment was increasingly frowned upon, the Naval Mutinies of 1797 coming as a salutary reminder that a real leader would not need to resort to brutality.Footnote 81 Many of these concerns were embodied in the revised Regulations and instructions of 1806, which strengthened the framework for shipboard chaplains and issued detailed stipulations about education, hygiene, and medical care.Footnote 82 That the Regulations were Barham's brainchild was no coincidence: while evangelicals were not unique in their concern for welfare, they helped to advance the case for paternal leadership and moral reform in a service that was already heading in that direction. As in their campaigns against slavery and for prison reform, they came increasingly to realize that they needed to care for bodies as well as souls if they wanted to be taken seriously.Footnote 83 Their assault on rough-and-tumble naval culture, then, was one way of preparing the ground for proselytism. This has implications for how we understand masculinity in the early nineteenth century. While John Tosh argues that domesticity was ‘integral to masculinity’, this needs to be qualified, for officers too were now expected to be fatherly.Footnote 84 The ‘domestic sphere’ could metaphorically expand to encompass all-male ‘households’ on board ships or in regiments, an idea that emerges with particular clarity from portrayals of religious conversations and ‘family prayers’ on Arctic voyages in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s.Footnote 85 This was linked to, and helped to reinforce, a broader shift away from aristocratic ideals of personal honour towards professional values such as duty and self-discipline.Footnote 86 In his celebrated Practical View (1797), Wilberforce had denounced duellists for esteeming ‘the favour of man’ over the ‘approbation of God’.Footnote 87 But attitudes were already changing. Whether evangelical or not, nineteenth-century naval biographers focused overwhelmingly on character, construing heroism to revolve around the cultivation of the inner man rather than the pursuit of status in the eyes of ‘the world’.Footnote 88
III
Developing models for behaviour was one thing. But evangelicals hankered after more deep-rooted change. They scanned naval and military journals for stirrings of revival, being uncomfortably aware that the armed forces formed a vast and neglected mission field. Although the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge had long supplied Bibles and improving literature, and was redoubling its efforts, the flow was sporadic, depending as it did on written requests from commanding officers.Footnote 89 That evangelical publicity efforts went into overdrive during the last decade or so of the war, then, was in part about supplying a shortage. Yet it also evinces a growing recognition of the need to win policy-makers around to the necessity of a different sort of religious provision. This next section breaks new ground by examining how evangelicals deployed philanthropy to reform Britain's fighting men and, in so doing, to market the advantages of their creed. Heroes were in vogue, and preachers and publicists were desperate to capitalize on their exploits.
Founded in 1779, by the turn of the nineteenth century the Naval and Military Bible Society (NMBS) was in seemingly terminal decline brought about by lack of public interest and the deaths of its original proponents.Footnote 90 Like the younger CMS, its annual sermon was held at St Anne Blackfriars, in the City, but the meagre returns from this and from other scattered collections meant that its financial situation was parlous.Footnote 91 This all changed in 1804–5 when a media-savvy consortium of bankers and metropolitan clergy resurrected it.Footnote 92 Their interest was not, as might be assumed, piqued by Trafalgar, although that almost certainly secured its prosperity thereafter; this was an endeavour that emerged from the period of invasion panic that preceded it. In its first incarnation, it had been run by nonconformists and open to all. Now, rank and affluence were given more weight: whereas the NMBS had originally been administered by a committee of twenty-one subscribers, a guinea now bought a year's governorship; ten guineas secured it for life.Footnote 93 Meetings were moved to Hatchard's bookshop on Piccadilly, a rendezvous of the evangelical upper crust. The results were striking. Over the next decade, a host of MPs and peers enlisted, being joined by a glittering array of naval and military names: Admirals Saumarez and Gambier; Earls Spencer and Radnor, Lord Willoughby de Broke, Lieutenant-General Robert Manners. Its figureheads were still more exalted: the patron was the commander-in-chief, the duke of York, the vice-patron the duke of Gloucester, the president the archbishop of Canterbury. The addition in 1815 of Wellington and Lord Liverpool brought further cachet.Footnote 94 While annual reports faithfully enumerated the books sent to regiments and ships, unusual effort went into parading prestigious supporters.
The NMBS played heavily on the equation of philanthropy with patriotism. ‘Where then is the Briton who loves his king and his country’, one report asked, ‘who will not cordially lend his aid to put the Bible into the hands of their intrepid defenders?’Footnote 95 There was no shortage of officers prepared to extol the qualities of soldiers and sailors who habitually read their Bibles.Footnote 96 Naturally, the NMBS was not the only society to play this card. Applications from seamen desperate for ‘an anchor of the soul’ made excellent publicity material for the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS). Some accounts were more believable than others: the Christian Observer reported implausibly that sailors in a recent shipwreck had dashed to rescue their Bibles before taking to the boats.Footnote 97 Years later, the clergyman Robert Wolfe would claim that religious observance transformed captured British seamen in France. ‘I have been through a depot of 1500 sailors, and not seen one drunken man!’ exclaimed one astonished observer.Footnote 98 Similar evidence was adduced repeatedly in the post-war period to argue that courage and audacity need not be sacrificed to sailors’ reformation. The BFBS made much of its provision of Bibles for Germans serving in the army and navy, for the Sea Fencibles and militia and even for French and Spanish prisoners of war in their own languages. Britain's duty was to all.Footnote 99
At the other end of the social scale, charities scrambled to secure celebrity endorsements from naval officers. While the NMBS could claim Admirals Exmouth, Northesk, Saumarez, and Torrington, the BFBS announced proudly in 1813 that Gambier, Hardy, and Murray had come forward on its behalf.Footnote 100 Naval luminaries were especially sought after to head local BFBS auxiliaries in port towns: Admirals Bertie and Bligh at Southampton in 1815, and Exmouth at Plymouth.Footnote 101 Radstock, Saumarez, Spencer and Barham all represented multiple societies, while Gambier excelled them all as member of thirty-nine, patron of three, governor of three, committee member of two, vice-president of eleven and president of another three, including the CMS.Footnote 102 Piety mattered, but prestige was just as important: had he been alive Nelson would certainly have been enlisted.Footnote 103 Among the more surprising recruits was Vice-Admiral Eliab Harvey, cashiered in 1809 after a notorious public spat in which he had abused Gambier as a canting ‘Methodist’ and ‘psalm-singer’.Footnote 104 Now president of the South-West Essex Auxiliary Bible Society, he observed seemingly without irony that ‘the distribution of the Bible must be attended with the happiest effects’ and that ‘there was the highest state of discipline on board those ships in which the Bible was most read’.Footnote 105 Whether or not Harvey really had undergone a change of heart, religious-style moralizing was now fashionable, and as the war began to turn against Napoleon in the early 1810s, philanthropic receipts boomed. The NMBS was among the chief recipients: annual collections climbed from just under £200 in 1804 to almost £4,500 in 1813–14. The expansion of the BFBS was similarly pronounced, exploding from £5,835 in 1808–9 to £14,284 the following year, £34,442 in 1811–12, and a staggering £65,748 in 1812–13.Footnote 106 In March 1813, an Admiralty order stipulated the provision of religious literature at government expense. It was not a specifically evangelical initiative, but their influence had undoubtedly helped to shape a new consensus in officialdom about the importance of religion. The real new departure, however, was in convincing a broad swathe of the upper and middle classes that morality and military success were intertwined. By exhorting people to dip into their pockets and showing where those funds were going, the NMBS and other societies were effectively creating a religious ‘home front’, where private philanthropy bolstered state provision. Joanna Innes has shown the persistence and expansion of similarly mixed welfare economies across wartime Europe, often justified by providential-patriotic rhetoric.Footnote 107
Pious valour sold well in the new climate. Even the unremarkable memoirs of Major-General Burn of the Marines attracted numerous subscribers from among the great and good.Footnote 108 Many ordered multiple copies, indicating that even pedestrian careers represented publicity that might usefully be distributed. For poorer consumers, there were cheap pamphlets and tracts. One of the bestsellers was The retrospect, published anonymously in 1816. By the 1840s it had gone through at least twenty editions. Its writer, Richard Marks, was living proof of the contention that the best Christian was also the best officer. After he left the sea, he sought Anglican ordination, but the career recounted in the Retrospect rivalled that of any far-fetched fictional sea-dog: two shipwrecks in the same year; heroism at Trafalgar; near-fatal illness; fights with fellow officers; and a brush with death when a clowning colleague shot a stone through his hat. His tracts were produced in enormous numbers, eventually achieving a circulation of over a million copies in Britain, the United States, and beyond. Combining pithy description with an expert grasp of nautical idiom, Marks made ordinary characters his mouthpieces in much the same way that the Cheap Repository Tracts had done in the 1790s.Footnote 109 The message was all the more powerful because it was made to come not from chaplains but from fellow sailors. In Conversation in a boat, for instance, ‘Harry Williams’ relates his testimony to ‘Tom Brown’: ‘I was once as mad-brained and thoughtless a fellow as ever sailed out of Shields harbour.’ He goes on to answer his friend's objections, concluding that now it is faith only that enables him to face death fearlessly: ‘never let it be said that religion and the Bible unfitted Harry Williams from doing his duty’.Footnote 110 In the sequel, The shipmates, Harry and Tom join forces to reclaim Joe Long, a ‘sad reprobate fellow’ who has gambled and whored away his pay, feeding and clothing him, taking him to a dockside church, and praying by his hammock. By the end, he has become, like them, both a model Christian and a model sailor.Footnote 111 Just as important as direct proselytism was Marks's Bunyanesque use of maritime existence as a source of metaphors for the religious life. Taken together, the Nautical essays map the perils that attend the sailor's earthly ‘voyage’, exhorting readers to avoid shipwreck – grog, women, and swearing – and pointing them towards the heavenly port.Footnote 112 As with many tracts, they may well have been read more by donors than by their intended readers; but they undoubtedly helped to prepare the ground for the extraordinary post-war growth of missions to seamen.Footnote 113
For those who had shivered at apocalyptic warnings a decade earlier, this was a miraculous reversal of fortunes. ‘We are sitting here like officers on the home staff’, crowed Henry Thornton in 1812,
receiving and giving dinners among Christians, Lords and Baronets, and MPs talking around our dessert table of the progress of Bible Societies and foreign Missions and enjoying the eminence of the religiousness of the day somewhat in the same manner in which the officers of the Duke of York's table delight in hearing of the capture of Cuidad [sic] Rodrigo or the battle of Barossa.Footnote 114
Smug retrospection was the order of the day. Evangelical spokesmen relished tracing an upward trajectory through the foundations of the CMS and Religious Tract Society (both 1799) and BFBS (1804) via abolition in 1807 towards the sunnier times of the present. It was ‘one of the most remarkable designs of Providence’, the MP Nicholas Vansittart told the BFBS, ‘that the thunder of universal war should have been the harbinger of the still small voice of the gospel of peace’.Footnote 115 By 1816, the mood had broadened into full-blown euphoria. No one could have predicted the elevation of ‘the obscure inhabitants of a little cheerless island, far to the north of the favoured region of philosophy, and literature, and liberty, and politeness, and wit’, expatiated the Christian Observer. ‘But behold these obscure islanders, with all the world in array against them, at once raised into the benefactors and deliverers of that world – humbling the proud with one hand, and saving the miserable with the other.’Footnote 116
With godliness in vogue among the rich and respectable, it now seemed credible to believe again that Britain had been allotted a privileged role in the fulfilment of the divine plan. Already in 1812, CMS spokesmen were talking in terms of global destiny: ‘is it presumptuous to indulge the humble and pious hope, that to Great Britain may be entrusted the high commission of making known the name of Jehovah to the whole earth?’Footnote 117 The passing in 1813 of the ‘Pious Clause’, allowing missionary access to India, further raised expectations that were then seemingly validated by victory at Waterloo. Pulpits rang with proclamations of an era in which missionary zeal and steam-powered print would transmit the gospel rapidly around the globe.Footnote 118 Integral to that vision was British seapower. Since at least the 1790s, a succession of exegetes had elided British fleets with the ‘Ships of Tarshish’ of Isaiah 60:9, a prophecy that talked about the restoration of Israel to its homeland.Footnote 119 Such interpretations were congenial to the nascent Christian Zionist movement, but they also melded into a more diffuse sense of maritime destiny. Captain Charles Penrose, for example, writing as ‘A.F.Y.’, thought that the navy might be harnessed to missionary purposes: ‘Nelson and his followers would have harassed our enemies beyond their resources by carrying a British army from place to place with ease and rapidity…and by proper attention we might spread the power of the gospel to all nations and languages by the same means.’Footnote 120 At the time, this was pure fantasy; but within a few years collaboration between missionaries and naval officers was a fact of life in the Pacific and elsewhere.Footnote 121
Immediately after the war, though, one event came more than any other to highlight Britain's newfound moral superpower status: the expedition despatched to the slave-holding Barbary states in mid-1816.Footnote 122 It was conceived as an act of showy gunboat philanthropy to demonstrate that Britain was in earnest about extirpating slavery, and to counter the suspicion that it was using the peace process to ruin its economic competitors. The mission became a symbol of the new symbiosis of moral muscle and military might, concluding with the spectacular bombardment of Algiers on 27 August, which cost almost 900 allied casualties and elicited the release of over 3,000 Christian slaves. If the casualty list was high, it provided reassuring confirmation that Britain was prepared to shed atoning blood for past sins. Just as gratifying to evangelicals was the unambiguously providential tone of Lord Exmouth's despatches and his proclamation that this ‘signal chastisement’ was in return for ‘atrocities’ on ‘defenceless Christians’.Footnote 123 As with the antislavery squadron stationed off West Africa, the strategic significance of Algiers was far outweighed by its symbolic moment; Mediterranean piracy would flourish for many years yet. Its symbolism mattered nonetheless. In the coming decades, providentialism provided important strands in developing British myths about a dominance founded on benevolence, a set of ideas that went far beyond narrowly evangelical or missionary constituencies.Footnote 124
IV
Let it not be forgotten that from my birth upwards all my associations and impressions were in favour not only of the lawfulness but of the glory of war. All the scenes of my childhood were crowded with memorials of the past, or tokens of the present connection of my family with the profession of arms. I was, so to speak, born and cradled in the midst of them. Epaulettes and cocked hats, the grapeshot that pierced my father's hipbone, the sword voted to him out of the Patriotic Fund…rich with blue steel and unwrought gold, my mother fainting at the news of my father's wounds – these are among the earliest visions of my infancy. The very playthings of our nursery were blocks, marlinespikes, or models of brigs and frigates with jacks and ensigns and appropriate rigging. War seemed the most normal condition of man, and peace a rare and vapid exception.Footnote 125
So wrote Sir Charles Brenton in 1855. The contrast between father and son could hardly have been more stark: Jahleel Brenton, as we have seen, had been a swashbuckling frigate captain who, like most loyal Anglicans, saw no contradiction between faith and fighting, whereas Charles was an Oxford-educated clergyman, biblical scholar, and pacifist who seceded from the Church of England to join the Brethren movement in the 1830s. His rueful reminiscences of a household packed with naval bric-a-brac are an eloquent symbol of how evangelicalism and militarism came to co-exist and indeed to reinforce one another during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. They also serve as a reminder of the tensions inherent in that partnership. Evangelicals, after all, placed a sharp distinction between worldliness and godliness; they also tried to follow in the footsteps of a Saviour who had preached a gospel of peace. If Christ was their ‘Captain of Salvation’ it did not necessarily follow that he approved of the ‘legalized murderers’ that Daniel Sykes and Charles Brenton found so objectionable. It was the Bible that his father had taught him to read, Brenton explained, that now inculcated the values that seemed so ‘Quakerlike, unwarlike, un-English’ in his son. He revered his father, as he did Colonel Gardiner, as a man of unshakeable belief, but while he hoped that his memoir might make warriors Christian, he deplored the idea that it might make Christians into warriors.Footnote 126
While few evangelicals during our period were so literalistic in their interpretation of the New Testament, they were well aware that there were other, subtler forms of courage that might be more meritworthy. Melville Horne's 1811 CMS sermon, for instance, explicitly contrasted missionary heroism with that of the warrior, making clear that while the latter faced danger, the calling of the missionary was immeasurably harder, demanding inward battles with temptation; ‘zeal’; ‘invincible fortitude’; and culminating in death among savages or alone, ‘without a friend to close his eyes’.Footnote 127 Similar ideas were behind the sensational reception accorded to the Arctic explorers Ross, Parry, and Franklin. All three were deeply pious, but they were also publicity conscious, and their presentation of a non-violent struggle drawing on mental as well as physical resources and underpinned by Christian observance was calculated to appeal to religious readers. Franklin's Narrative of a journey to the shores of the polar sea (1823) was devoured for reports of fortitude inspired by faith. ‘We are presented with a palpable and triumphant proof’, wrote one reviewer, ‘of the superiority of that courage, which emanates from a religious dependence upon the power and promise of God, over that which is supplied by mere instinct and constitution.’Footnote 128 Note the stress on superior courage rather than actual success. In 1854–5, J. H. Gurney hit a familiar note in his Exeter Hall lectures on God's heroes and the world's heroes, being prepared to acknowledge the moral merits of, say, a Wellington or a Washington, but only on the way to making the point that ‘mankind generally make too much of military prowess and successes’.Footnote 129 On such questions, conventional distinctions between ordinary and special providence were important, for while achievements were sometimes read as result of special interposition, in other cases they might simply be the result of superior numbers, technology, or skill.Footnote 130 There existed similar tensions in the posthumous beatification of the archetypical mid-Victorian Christian hero, Henry Havelock. For one hagiographer, he was ‘every inch a Christian, and every inch a soldier’, but for others, morality mattered more than military achievement: ‘Havelock was more than a soldier; he was a saint.’Footnote 131 Even at the High Noon of mid-century ‘Christian Militarism’, success in worldly affairs ultimately mattered less than winning one's inner battles, a get-out clause that counted all the more when providence proved fickle, and which remained central to Victorian and Edwardian notions of character, albeit in modified ways. Failure did not prevent Captain Scott and his men from being hailed as heroes in 1912, being ‘determined still to do our best to the last’, as the famous note proclaimed.Footnote 132
Yet in the decades either side of 1800, most evangelicals bought into the idea that the truest Christian was also the best soldier, the best sailor, the genuine patriot. Pacifism remained the preserve of plebeian radicals and outré nonconformists. On one level, this was simply a consequence of the spread of moral seriousness among the professional classes of late Hanoverian Britain. Nevertheless, this article has taken issue with the idea that evangelicals simply jumped on patriotic and philanthropic bandwagons and rode them towards respectability, as recent work implies.Footnote 133 It has shown that they aggressively marketed their own ideas about providence, morality, and individual character, ideas that had particular purchase in wartime and that continued to shape constructions of masculinity in the decades to come. They insisted not just that their creed was serviceable but that it provided the only reliable basis for Britishness, for masculinity, for love of one's country. Altered public perceptions underline their success. For in stark contrast to the disreputable, brutalized Jack Tar or Tommy Atkins of yesteryear, it suited Victorians to imagine that their well-scrubbed bluejackets and redcoats were disciplined and upstanding, that they were men of simple but certain faith. In short, they were eminently suited to act as agents for a nation that saw its global role not in terms of geopolitics but of civilizing mission.
