Men of War: The Changing Face of Heroism in the 19th Century Navy. David Crane

and the greater the moral and physical degradation around him, the more brilliantly Peel’s armour shone. Nobody who saw him under fire in the trenches of the Crimea would ever forget his air of quiet and inviolable self-mastery, and it would be the same again in India, where he could ride through a landscape of decomposing corpses and tree boughs heavy with hanged rebels as if it was some mythological world of chimeras and goblins conjured up by a Malory to try his knightly resolve.

      If the face of heroism had changed between the Homeric code that Hastings embraced and the medieval code of a Peel, the life and death of the third of these naval officers provides perhaps the most vivid proof of how it would mutate again before the Victorian age was very much older. In the eyes of a man like Thomas Hughes there might have seemed no conflict between ‘chivalry’ and Christianity, but to a sterner moralist of Thomas Arnold’s stamp the whole cult of chivalry – with its essential egotism, its elitism, its self-reliance, its glamorised brutality, its culture of ‘honour’ rather than ‘duty’ – was not some knightly expression of the gospels but the enemy and antithesis of those true Christian virtues that a Protestant England would eventually find in James Graham Goodenough.

      The cultural divide between Peel and James Goodenough was not the same in either degree or kind as that between either man and Hastings, but it was in its way just as profound. It is always tempting to think of change in terms of generations or decades, but history rarely evolves so neatly, and although only six years separated the two men in age, the Britain that mourned Peel’s death in India in 1858 was not the same country that would thrill to Goodenough’s less than twenty years later.

      When Peel died the country commemorated the life of a peerless knight; when Goodenough was killed it celebrated the death of a national martyr. In those two responses lies a world of difference. It was not that ‘Holy Joe’ Goodenough had been any less of a natural fighter than either Hastings or Peel, or had been engaged in ‘better’ wars, but that his ‘heroic’ death at the hands of a group of island ‘savages’ whom he refused to harm chimed not just with Britain’s growing sense of its Sacred Mission but with the tastes, prejudices and religious instincts of an ascendant middle class ready to claim Goodenough as its own.

      It was in some ways a curious claim to make on a man married to a goddaughter of the Queen, but in more important respects they had it right. By birth and education Goodenough might have sprung from an ethos of refined privilege, but in his faith, social conscience and his impregnable, teetotalling respectability he belonged squarely to that middle-class world – to a world that stretched from the products of Arnold’s Rugby at one end to the chapel, mission and Low Church pamphleteer at the other – that was learning to look to its own kind for the embodiments of national greatness. ‘The middle class of this country may well be proud of such men as these,’ wrote The Times of Havelock, Nicholson and Neill, the heroes of the Indian Mutiny, ‘born and bred in their ranks – proud of such representatives, such reflections of their own best and most sterling characteristics, – proud of men who were noble without birth, without the pride of connexions, without a breath of fashion, and without a single drop of Norman blood in their veins.’

      But if in Goodenough the middle classes had, at last, the real thing, a Christian warrior who lived and died by what he preached, the concept of a ‘naval martyr’ was not without its difficulties. The sole reason that the public at large had been happy to indulge the chiliastic nonsense of a man like Vicars was that he could also fight like a lion, and if Sir Henry Havelock, the hero of Lucknow, was allowed to treat the world to the spectacle of an exemplary Christian death it was because he had made damned sure to precede it with a campaign of unedifying Old Testament ferocity.

      Goodenough, though, was different, and if he chased Glory as assiduously as Hastings and Peel had done, it was the Glory of the next world and not of this. Throughout his long and distinguished career he did all he could to reconcile the conflicting claims of his faith and his profession, but when, finally, in the pursuit of Britain’s Sacred Mission among the natives of the Pacific islands he had to choose between ‘love’ and ‘duty’, and paid for it with his life, a new and disturbing kind of naval hero was born.

      There were those in the service who were dismayed by his choice, but if the sword that had been left to Edward Scott had come a long way in forty years to stay so firmly sheathed on a beach on Santa Cruz, Hastings would at least have recognised the forces that had brought Goodenough to such an end. In the years since his own death the whole concept of heroism might have changed, but if – to use George Finlay’s phrase – those ‘elements of true greatness’ that had combined in him to produce a martyr to Greek freedom coalesced in Goodenough to create a profoundly different kind of hero, then the elements themselves remained just the same.

      Courage, sacrifice, selflessness, ardour, energy, vanity, pride – the self-referential vanity of the hero, the spiritual pride of the martyr – they are all there, but if there is one key to the lives that follow it probably lies in the ‘thirst for glory’ that Hastings confessed was the driving force of his life. There are any number of reasons why men fight, and then there are the reasons that they give, but whether it was an earthly or a heavenly reward, the ‘lustre of a name’ that Peel spoke of or the lustre of a martyr’s crown, the battles of the sea that were the only sort Hastings knew or Bunyan’s battles of the soul, the pursuit of ‘Glory’ – whatever the price – was, in all three men, what Alexander Pope would have called the ‘Ruling Passion’.

      And no nineteenth-century naval officer needed to be reminded of where the paths of glory almost inevitably lead. ‘There is no death so glorious, so much to be desired, as on the battlefield,’ wrote Captain Oliver Jones, who had helped support the wounded Peel at Lucknow, and if an ironic fate robbed each of Hastings, Peel and Goodenough of that particular happiness, they were, like Tennyson’s Sir Perceval, at least allowed to glimpse the Grail. In their last moments as fighting men each saw the glory that they had lived for, and none of them would have had it any different. For the Homeric warrior, the ‘parfait gentil knyght’ and the soldier of Christ alike, death – ‘the experience of all experiences’, as Charles Kingsley put it – was not the negation of hopes and ambitions, but what Goodenough, writing to a wife who would rejoice in his Christian triumph, called ‘the happy crown of life’.

       Hastings

       The Happy Warrior

      I

      IN THE LATE AFTERNOON of 18 June 1819, a Royal Navy brig of war seven weeks out of England came into a busy Port Royal harbour on the island of Jamaica under a flamboyant press of sail. It was a manoeuvre her young commander had seen and admired in other captains, and as the Kangaroo came alongside the moored flagship, Iphigenia, he gave the order to shorten all sail and simultaneously let go her anchor.

      It would have been a flashy manoeuvre in a vessel that handled better than the Kangaroo, and as she began to drift towards the Iphigenia, her commander found himself powerless to stop her. The First Lieutenant in the flagship had been engaged on the blind side of the quarterdeck as the Kangaroo came in, and the first he knew of the danger was when the shouting brought him across to the starboard rail to see the Kangaroo ‘broadside on’ and ‘apparently drifting’ under her own momentum athwart the Iphigenia’s cable. ‘I instantly ordered the Boatswain to send out the Forecastle men to run in the flying Jib boom,’ he recalled. ‘Captain Parker gave orders for veering the cable which I went to see executed as the Kangaroo would certainly have been on board of us had it not been done.’

      The incident and the danger were over in a moment, but the Iphigenia was neither the ship, nor Iphigenia’s captain the man to have affronted in this way. ‘You have overlayed our anchor,’ shouted the future Admiral Sir Hyde Parker – son of Admiral Sir Hyde Parker, grandson of Vice-Admiral Sir Hyde Parker Bt. ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, you damned Lubber, who are you?’

      It would be another thirty-six hours before Hyde Parker got a reply to his question, but the answer when it came was ‘Lieutenant and Commander’ Frank