For Honour's Sake (23 page)

Realizing he could not take the offensive immediately, Smyth agreed to an indefinite extension of the armistice with the understanding that it could be cancelled by either party on thirty hour.' notice. The American general then settled into writing more reports full of fiery pronouncements and drafting bold plans for definitive actions while Sheaffe turned his more practically inclined mind toward calling up more militia and strengthening the defences running across the breadth of the peninsula.
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It was a strange way to carry on a war, but the armistice suited each man's purpose, and, as Smyth did not report its existence to Washington, President Madison remained unaware that the war on the Canadian front was effectively at a standstill.

T
he British government was even less aware of events in North America, for the most recent communiqué from Governor Sir George Prevost had reported only Hull's surrender. Late summer had been a period of reorganization as Sir Henry Bathurst took the reins of secretary for war and the colonies, but by mid-September the man responsible for prosecution of both the war against France and this undesired conflict with America, in addition to most matters of colonial administration, had taken his desk at the War and Colonial Office. Despite being one of the world's two most powerful nations and undisputed master of a far-flung empire, Britain had a distinctly small bureaucracy. Most offices directly serving the cabinet were clustered in cramped quarters between St. James's Park and the Thames, making them convenient to the Houses of Parliament. The War and Colonial Office occupied a humble seventeenth-century house at No. 14 Downing Street, close to St. James's Park and just a few doors from the prime minister's No. 10 residence. Although prestigiously situated, the house was shabbily constructed, not only dark and drafty but usually damp because of a leaking basement that had to be regularly pumped dry. The offices were cramped and dreary.
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Scattered through the small, dank rooms was a modest staff that consisted of two undersecretaries, a chief clerk, nineteen clerks, a private secretary, a précis writer, a librarian, and several translators.
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In 1801, the war and colonial bureaucracies had been amalgamated because the two inextricably overlapped. Although the theory seemed sound, execution
resulted in an office constantly bursting at the seams with files and paperwork while being inevitably short-staffed.

Tradition held that responsibility for ensuring each ministry operated efficiently rested with the minister. This meant that the minister was expected to personally handle all important matters. Furthermore, there was a clear division of function between the political men, such as Bathurst, and the permanent officials in the office, such as the undersecretaries. It fell to the minister to decide policy, which was modified only “in response to the criticism of colleagues in the Cabinet.”
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The permanent officials then implemented the policy, but generally played no major part in its development or in orchestrating modifications once policy met the test of reality.

Lord Liverpool's cabinet was much inclined toward this traditional bureaucratic model because the prime minister was noted for “his assiduity as a man of business.”
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Liverpool was never given to standing back and letting others manage things. Rather, he was deeply involved in all important matters of state. Viscount Castlereagh was so similarly inclined that most dispatches emanating from Foreign Affairs were not only drafted by him but a product of his own hand.

Such exercise of control came at a price: a ministry's effectiveness was limited by the ability of the minister to process its regular business while also developing sound policy in response to critically important issues or developments. The workload for ministers holding major portfolios was crushingly heavy, and this was particularly the case in 1812 for Castlereagh and Bathurst, for they were jointly responsible for the war with France and now the one with America. A workhorse, Castlereagh prided himself on mastery of every detail, so was as well suited for such great responsibility as anybody could have been. Bathurst's abilities were less clear.

His early political appointments resulted from close friendship with William Pitt “the Younger” and his family's record of government service dating back to the Restoration. His distinguished grandfather had served in the House of Lords after gaining a peerage in 1712, becoming privy councillor in 1742. His father, the 2nd Earl Bathurst, who bestowed his first given name on his eldest son at his birth on May 22, 1762, followed a legal path that resulted in his appointment as a judge of the Court of
Common Pleas in 1754. From 1771 to 1778 he was Lord Chancellor. The younger Bathurst succeeded to the earldom when his father died in 1794. He was fifty when Lord Liverpool asked him on June 10, 1812, to become secretary for war and the colonies.

Contemporaries saw Bathurst's appointment as a sign that the Liverpool administration was scraping the barrel for talent. His previous posts had been of an inconspicuous nature, requiring only pedestrian administrative skill. The ever-watchful Lady Harriet Arbuthnot thought him “a very bad minister for present times, he likes everything to go in the old way, likes a job for the sake of a job, not to get money into his own pocket for there cannot be a more disinterested man, but he hates all innovations.”
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While Bathurst figured among the true Tories, who disdained the emerging liberal economic theories, and was a devout High Church Anglican, he was more open to innovation than Lady Arbuthnot credited. Bathurst's manner was his enemy, for he was self-effacing to a fault and too shy to be a competent public speaker. Like many shy men, Bathurst deflected attention with affable good humour, a light-hearted wit, endless anecdotes cast together in a seeming jumble, and a lack of apparent seriousness that left the impression of shallowness.

Bathurst's true nature was exposed in his writing. Quill in hand, he scratched out words quickly and without hesitation. Thoughts were put down with assurance, almost never corrected. He seldom bothered writing a first draft. As his penmanship was easily read, Bathurst saw little point in giving his correspondence to a private secretary to transcribe. Also, awkward at formulating thoughts verbally, he avoided dictation.

On June 11, the day after his appointment, Bathurst threw himself with typical vigour into running No. 14 Downing Street. But it was in how he came at the job that Bathurst demonstrated an innovative trait. Quickly accepting that the vast responsibilities of the ministry were beyond the ability of any single person to competently master, Bathurst carefully delegated duties and responsibility to his staff—particularly the two undersecretaries.

In 1810, Castlereagh, then secretary for war and the colonies, had decided that although the ministry had been combined originally because
of the interrelation of military and colonial issues, there should be some measure of specialization within the staff. He therefore created a War Department and a Colonial Department, each overseen by an undersecretary with his own staff. Bathurst refined matters, not just using the undersecretaries to implement his instructions but entrusting these men with responsibility in developing policy and determining the best response to immediate problems.

The War Department undersecretary was Maj. Gen. Sir Henry Bunbury, who had been undersecretary for the entire office from the time of his appointment in 1809 until Castlereagh's reorganization. At that time Castlereagh brought in young Robert Peel to become Colonial Department undersecretary. Although this was Peel's first political office, his needing only to focus on colonial matters rather than also juggling the prosecution of the war with France led to his performance being noted. When Liverpool formed his government, he appointed Peel chief secretary for Ireland, creating an opening in the Colonial Department.

His replacement, Henry Goulburn, reported for duty on August 4. In two years time this young man, who was expected to be more intimately involved in details of the war's prosecution than any other person in the British government, would be in Ghent treating with the Americans. Goulburn was tall and slim, with a mop of dark hair beginning to recede from the forehead, and his slender face was often set in a serious expression. As an infant, Goulburn had been the victim of a bizarre accident when his nurse sat on his head, leaving a permanent indentation in his skull and equally lasting vision damage to his right eye that rendered him slightly “cock-eyed.” This affliction, combined with his dour demeanour, led some to believe that he looked upon them with condescension and more than a touch of arrogance.

The young man's grimly serious manner resulted from a life where the pleasures of a normal British upper-class childhood had been lost early. Goulburn had been but nine and the eldest of three children when his father, Munbee, died at age thirty-five. Born in Jamaica, Munbee Goulburn had been the only child of a sugar-plantation owner who had died six months after the boy's birth. Sent to Eton for his education, Munbee had remained in England after graduation and married
Susannah Chetwynd. Although Susannah's family was of noble lineage, its link to landed property had been lost two generations earlier and her prospects for marriage were such that a young man boasting unencumbered title to an estate in Jamaica yielding an annual income of never less than £5,000 made an attractive match.

Munbee soon succumbed to the common temptation of absentee colonial estate holders by living far beyond his means. To cover the growing debts, he mortgaged the estate several times over. Young Henry was oblivious to the brewing calamity of this financial recklessness, revelling in the idyllic environment of Prinknash Park, a Cotswold country manor four miles from Gloucester that Munbee rented. Here he frolicked through a small beech forest, doing his best to escape attempts by Munbee and the local curate to instill the beginnings of an education—a process complicated by the fact that the Goulburns followed the fashion of the times for nobility of speaking French at home, so that the boy was more conversant in this language than in English. He was also given to tantrums, resulting in long periods of incarceration in his room that interrupted his education. When Henry turned seven he was packed off to Dr. Moore's School in Sunbury and surprisingly discovered that his English and Latin equalled that of the other students. But his “passionate” temper remained, marked by impetuosity and rebelliousness that got him into constant trouble.

Then his father died, and Susannah's comfortable life collapsed as Munbee's many debts were called in and she was forced to sell his personal property and cast the family's affairs to the Court of Chancery for disposition. At the same time her health, always frail, began to decline. While waiting for the grindingly slow court determination on what, if any, of the estate in Jamaica would remain hers, Susannah was by stages forced to find more modest residences. Years dragged by and circumstances only worsened, while the court was closed more often than engaged in deliberations over the many such cases lying before it. Eventually, through the intervention of family friend Matthew Montagu, Spencer Perceval—then a prominent lawyer—helped negotiate their case through the court. Seeing much potential in the young lad, Montagu also took an interest in Henry's future.

At sixteen, Henry began studying for the entrance exams to Trinity College, Cambridge. Upon his father's death, he had undergone a distinct character change. As his mother's health worsened, the bouts of sickness becoming more extended, Henry had quietly assumed the role of head of the household, to the point of even supervising the business management of the Jamaican estate. In Matthew Montagu the teenager found a father figure, the man showing uncommon integrity that Goulburn sought to emulate.

By the end of 1801, Goulburn matriculated and was admitted to Trinity. He studied hard, but was handicapped by having had no consistent tutoring or schooling during his childhood. There was also the problem of poverty relative to his peers. While there was sufficient money to cover tuition, Goulburn carefully concealed the fact that there was no butler to clean his clothes or servant to prepare the family breakfast. Not long before graduating with an MA in 1808, Henry had to sell his mother's dinnerware to raise sufficient money to provide her with an allowance capable of covering the cost of a small house in Phillimore Place, Kensington, where she could live out the last of her life in relative comfort.

Goulburn left Cambridge with an unremarkable academic record, a belief in evangelical Anglicanism that suited his deeply conservative world outlook, and vital links with men holding positions of power in the government that Montagu knew would serve the young man well in the future. Disinclined to enter into commerce or to return to Jamaica to directly oversee the plantation that now yielded an annual return after expenses of £2,000, Goulburn was drawn to public service. He naturally inclined this way, his religion and tutelage by Montagu having instilled in him the belief that this was a higher calling for a man of good character.