Words of Command (Hervey 12) (Matthew Hervey) (28 page)

Hervey thought it all very admirable, but rather in advance of what he understood the Home department was intending – except, of course, that at the time of disbanding, His Majesty’s Government had only been anxious to avoid the expense of keeping in being such of the yeomanry as had not been called out for some time, leaving it for the gentlemen of the corps to decide if they would continue in being entirely at their own expense. But it was no part of his remit to argue the Home Secretary’s case; if the lord lieutenant were placing certain matters in hand then all he had need to do was judge their efficacy against what he knew to be the War Office’s intentions.

‘So you’ll see, Colonel Hervey, that events have, as it were, overtaken your purpose in coming here. Within a month or so we shall have a troop once more at Downham, and at Dereham, Yarmouth and Halesworth.’

Hervey put him right regarding his mission, in particular the regular reinforcements that he was to judge expedient.

‘Of course,’ the lord lieutenant conceded affably, ‘the regulars aren’t my business, but I’m at a loss to understand how you are to decide matters before an application is made by the civil power. Do not mistake me, Colonel; I am heartened by this evidence of the authorities’ forethought – the Horse Guards’ forethought – which must proceed from the impulse of government; I detect the duke’s hand in this for sure, and I’m glad of it – overdue as it may be.’

Hervey assured him that the Horse Guards’ purpose was to be more ‘anticipatory’ than merely answering to the civil power, some degree of ‘deterrent’ effect perhaps – while, of course, the authority of the magistrates and the other officers of the law was in all things absolute: a regiment sent from London, say, might replace the Royals at Norwich, who in turn might disperse to support the troops of yeomanry, or they might disperse themselves throughout the county to give that support instead, or even in addition to, but also to act independently if the need arose – but be able to combine rapidly that they might scour the roads, for example, by day and by night, relay information, ‘master’ the country. His own assessment, from study of his maps and the census returns, had led him, he explained, to the same conclusions, broadly, as the lord lieutenant – that Yarmouth, Dereham and Downham were the appropriate towns in which to place the major elements of any reinforcement, but also Thetford, rather than Halesworth; and he wondered, too, about the influence the Royals – or whoever were the regular cavalry – would be able to retain in Norwich if there were a general tumult elsewhere in the county and their squadrons dispersed; for a city of sixty thousand could not be left to a mere depot troop.

And the lord lieutenant, seeing the evidence of the War Office’s earnest and the address of the Horse Guards, told him that he placed himself at Hervey’s disposal in the coming days – indeed, that his party should stay at Kimberley Park until he felt their work was done. And at a stroke Hervey perceived that his work thus changed from inquiry to confirmation – more exact, immeasurably easier and greatly quicker; and, indeed, altogether more agreeable.

So it proved. For a fortnight he travelled the county, though Halesworth he left to St Alban, and the northernmost parts he was assured were under the best regulation by the great families, and not therefore needing his personal attention. Everywhere he was received hospitably and with intelligence, so that he not only completed the assignment ahead of his best expectations but also formed a considerable attachment to the county – which he freely admitted was not that of his imaginings; at least, the ‘slowness’ of the people he instead began to see as more a worthy instinct for the better ways of times past than innate dullness – of times before, as one of the recusant gentry put it to him, ‘the stripping of the altars’.

And what altars – what churches. He was compelled so many times to stop and gaze, or to enter and be astonished. It was as if he travelled in foreign parts, on some grand tour. What manner of place must this county have been five centuries ago, when these pinnacles, buttresses, clerestories, fan vaultings and hammer beams were fashioned – the people more numerous, the wealth much greater. And the towers – solid-square, as a keep, or round, like a turret; and reaching so high above land so plane that it seemed every prospect encompassed a dozen half-castles framed against a vast sky.

But his true instincts were never long repressed by mere sightseeing. Was there ever such opportunity to master a country, to place it, as the French said,
sous surveillance
, as here? From the top of each tower, square or round, a corporal with a telescope might see everything that passed between him and the next. And, with but a little extemporization, some system of signalling might be devised to summon help rapidly in the case of mischief. He began relishing the possibility, the trial – pitting his regiment over such a distance against the dark forces of riot, mutiny, rebellion. And he put St Alban to work for a morning in the library at Kimberley to make a survey – the result heartening; indeed he thought it so promising that even had his survey of the yeomanry yielded nothing auspicious he could assure the Horse Guards they need have no fear of Norfolk. There were, outside the towns, a little short of five hundred churches. If half of these were to be made videttes it would render the better part of the whole county under the eye of authority – the work of but one battalion of Rifles, or, indeed, of any battalion of the Line practised in outpost duties. It was, he felt sure, a proposal that itself justified the entire wintry exercise, even had he not been able to make so expedient a report on the yeomanry.

And so after his grand tour of the county, during which the spring’s thaw set in – which, though it made some of the roads heavy going, allowed him to observe how much of the country was under the plough rather than pasture – he visited the Royals once more to talk with their commanding officer, and then spent three days before the fire in the library at Kimberley compiling the report for the War Office, making a copy for the lord lieutenant and a second for himself, so that he could send his findings at once to the Horse Guards.

It was on the last day of the month, therefore, that with the greatest sense of satisfaction as well as of anticipation he at last felt able to visit his old and very dear friend Laughton Peto.

‘I will tell you about Captain Peto,’ he said, as they bid farewell to Kimberley Park and set off on the thirty miles to Houghton Hall in the north of the county. ‘I met him when he was a frigate captain, almost fifteen years ago, and I was taking passage to India. And then again ten years on when he was commodore of the flotilla which attacked Rangoon, though we’d seen each other in the years between. And for Rangoon he was knighted, and very properly, for the business was done with great despatch. And then, with the reductions in the navy, he was for some time without a ship, until summoned to command of the
Prince Rupert
, the only first-rate in commission, and to take her to join Admiral Codrington’s squadron in the Mediterranean.’

‘Ah – Navarino.’

‘Indeed – the “untoward event”.’

Poor Codrington: told to cooperate with the French and the Russians to compel the Turks to leave Greek waters – but without resort to force – he had sought to overawe the Ottoman fleet in the bay at Navarino, in the Peloponnese, but it had come to a fight and the Turk had been sent to the bottom. London was furious: ‘I send you the ribbon of the Garter,’ the King wrote to Codrington; ‘I should be sending you the rope.’ But Peto was most grievously wounded in the battle.

‘Indeed he is a cripple, a chair-bound invalid,’ said Hervey, shaking his head. ‘When I saw him last, two years ago or thereabout, it was the most pitiable sight, for he had lived for the sea … But there’s evidently much fellowship in the county, and Peto’s being a Norfolk man – his late father a parson, like Nelson’s – the Marquess of Cholmondeley took him in at Houghton.’

He did not say that Kat had made the arrangements, though he remembered her words as if yesterday – ‘And George has most eagerly contracted to attend to all dear Captain Peto’s needs until such time as he is able to return to his own house.’

She had never met Peto but knew of her lover’s strong affection for him. Indeed, Hervey had wondered at her efforts on his old friend’s behalf, so close to his wedding with Kezia, but had promptly dismissed his worst thoughts as unworthy. Besides, what did it matter what motive had secured for his friend such a comfortable convalescence?

But Peto had not yet returned to his own house. That much he knew. How might he ever return, indeed, needing the ministry of nursemaids? And where were the nursemaids to live – and the cook and the housemaids and the valet and all the others who would needs attend on him, for his house, he had always protested, was very small (‘good only for a curate’, he used to say)?

‘I was William Cholmondeley’s fag at Eton – the marquess’s brother. He was not a hard taskmaster.’

Hervey, still contemplating his old friend’s abject condition, scarcely heard. He pinched himself. ‘Indeed?’

‘Now he’s member for Castle Rising, a stone’s throw from Houghton – a rotten borough!’

Hervey frowned. ‘St Alban, you try me.’

But St Alban was not going to allow the opportunity to pass. ‘Truly, Colonel, how can it serve that another green mound, like Old Sarum, returns a member – two members indeed – and Birmingham none?’

Hervey sighed indulgently. ‘I suppose you might argue that if our forefathers, who strove so manfully to make a parliament, chose to dispose the seats in this way, who now should gainsay them?’

‘Colonel, are not members of parliament meant to be lawmakers, not antiquarians?’

Hervey smiled. ‘Castle Rising is, I grant you, from what I observed when we came out of Linn Regis, a place that might not justify returning two members – or, I grant you, even one. But hard cases make bad laws, as I’ve said before. So how does a good Whig square his conscience and accept a rotten borough?’

St Alban smiled by return. ‘Cholmondeley is a Tory, Colonel. Perhaps in the circumstances – our going to Houghton and all – it is better that I do not speak of Reform.’

‘I think so too. We are here, after all, for the preservation of the peace, not to excite tumult. Besides, I shouldn’t want to be denied the best port.’

They went by way of Dereham, which they’d visited earlier and knew there were good post-horses to be got, and Fakenham, which they’d not seen, and where they rested the Dereham hirelings – excellent clean-limbed trotters – and ate a hearty stew of mutton. Their progress had been slow on account of the roads – cross roads not turnpikes – which would have been better going before the thaw; and also to spare the horses, for they were unsure if they’d find a change at Fakenham (which in the event, they did not, the place keeping changes only for ‘The Hero’ plying between Linn and Cromer). So on they drove for Houghton with the tiring roadsters and the no less wearying Corporal Wakefield and his fellow postilion.

The Linn road, fortunately, was flat, turnpiked and in good repair, but they took it at just a jogging trot, and stretches walking, for Hervey had told Corporal Wakefield that they’d be out again in the morning and he didn’t wish to beg fresh horses. It was a full two hours after leaving the Red Lion in Fakenham, therefore, that they turned off for New Houghton – ‘new’ not because, like so many villages in the county, the Black Death had carried off the old, but because a century before, the prime minister – the
first
prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole – had uprooted the old (save the church) to make way for his great new house and its park. But Sir Robert had done his tenants well, reckoned Hervey, seeing how good and large were the cottages – profit too of the public purse.

And what profit: the drive from lodge to house was as splendid as any he’d seen – ancient oaks, sweet chestnut, so many deer as to be uncountable, and the house itself greater than Longleat, perhaps even Wilton. What a piece of work this Walpole must have been, who ‘judged of men’s worth by the weight of their fee’. And then an earldom … Yet, as in Adam, all die; and Walpole had been dust these many years. Was all this a monument to anything worthy? He began to grow restless. He was uncertain whether he could like this present
châtelain
, for all his hospitality to Peto.

And then he shook himself. He had a strange disposition to resentment – ‘strange’ because, as a steadfast Tory, he believed essentially in the old order of things. ‘Are you well acquainted with the family, would you say, St Alban?’

After so prolonged a silence his travelling companion was a little taken aback. ‘I … I am acquainted, Colonel, yes. But I cannot claim intimacy.’

‘Mm.’

‘Is there anything you wish to know? I—’

Hervey waved a hand. ‘No matter. We shall see what we shall see.’

But if St Alban would have known more, and Hervey, their thoughts were diverted now by the appearance of several footmen, who beckoned Corporal Wakefield towards an arch beneath the
piano nobile
, like that at the Horse Guards.