Gareth Glover has here provided us with an edition and commentary on the experiences of Colonel Sir George Ridout Bingham (1777-1833) in Portugal and Spain, then his voyage to Saint Helena on Northumberland. It also includes letters written on Saint Helena found in Bingham’s papers.
The book provides a welcome, previously-unpublished (it would appear) addition to the story of the Peninsular War. It also brings to light precious but hard-to-track-down eye-witness accounts regarding Napoleon on Saint Helena. In both respects it is an important book. The Peninsula War account is particularly interesting for the colour it gives. Bingham comes over as if he were on the Grand Tour, singleing out for attention the fine church choir singing and the beautiful Portuguese towns and estates in which he is billetted. As befits a man who appreciates the finer things in life (Gorrequer, Lowe’s ADC on Saint Helena, nicknamed him ‘Swell’), Bingham shudders and passes quickly over the savagery inflicted by the rank and file on the local population (brought on by harsh forced marshes and privations of every sort). As a useful addition to the memoir literature on the Peninsular War it is important.
The Saint Helena material is similarly of great interest; it was an excellent idea to bring the documents together in one publication. I do have however some significant bibliographical quibbles. There is no mention (let alone inclusion in the book) of Bingham’s letters to Hudson Lowe held in the British Library (mss Add MSS 20115-20233 passim). Whilst one can sympathise with this omission (a trawl through these eighty or so very long and often hard to read manuscripts would have been a thankless task) this would have added greatly to the originality of the book. These letters therefore remain unpublished and unknown. Glover is furthermore not careful to differentiate between what has, and what has not, been previously published – or indeed who was the author of some of the material presented. Whilst he ‘believes’ on page 296 that Gorrequer’s letter to Wynyard concerning Napoleon’s funeral has never been published, it was in fact published in The Cornhill Magazine in January/February 1901, a publication cited by Glover. As to the authorship of the 41 ‘Letters from Saint Helena’, presented here as chapter 6, pp. 261-301, only 9 are in fact by Bingham, the rest being penned by Bingham’s wife, Emma (9 letters, one previously published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1896, vol. CLX, no. DCCCCLXXII, pp. 540-549), John Mansell (2 letters, one previously published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine), Charles Harrison (16 letters) and Gorrequer (2 letters, previously published, as mentioned above). Another serious case of omission is the non-appearance in the bibliography of a publication which also includes some of Bingham’s writings, notably what Glover refers to as the ‘Northumberland Diary’, namely, Napoleon and his fellow travellers, ed. C. K. Shorter (London, Cassell, 1908). If the manuscript copy of the ‘Northumberland Diary’ held at the Dorset Record Office (UK) was ‘compiled in a format obviously designed for publishing’ (as Glover contends, p. 5), perhaps that copy was prepared for C. K. Shorter’s edition.
I do however applaud Glover’s effort to bring these obscure but important texts to the attention of the Napoleonic public – hence the appearance here as ‘Book of the Month’. However the way the Saint Helena material is presented is almost disinformation. That Bingham’s Saint Helena writings have been previously published does no harm whatsoever to this re-publication – we do not all have the January/February 1901 edition of The Cornhill Magazine on our bookshelves! All I crave is a little bibliographical rigour!
P.H.
Gareth Glover has been a student of the Napoleonic wars for twenty-five years and was editor of Letters from the Battle of Waterloo (2004).