Quicksilver Captain
Jacqueline Reiter fans (and there are many) will know that she has been working on her biography of Sir Home Popham for so long that I’m not sure that her subject (died 1820) wasn’t still alive when she started writing. Late last year, the book was finally published by Helion (in their ‘From Reason to Revolution’ series) and it has been well worth the wait.
Popham was an unlikely naval officer. He had intended to pursue a career in law but financial problems in his family meant that he had to abandon his studies and find paying employment in a hurry. Aged just under 16, he joined the crew of HMS Hyaena as a first-class volunteer under Captain Edward Thompson, who became a surrogate father to him.
Under Thompson, Popham flourished, but when Thompson died, in 1786, Popham lost a valuable patron and learned a vital lesson about the reality of naval life at the time: promotion depended as much (or more) on who you knew than on your professional skill. Popham’s life from then on was as much about gaining political backing for his professional progression as about his naval skill and knowledge. Fortunately he had family connections in the East India Company and, for a while, he abandoned the navy to trade on his own behalf in the Far East.
From then on, his life was a confusion of political manoeuvring, naval work and making money, either alongside his official position or in independent ventures. Reiter’s biography is therefore a tale of ducking and weaving that would leave Del Boy speechless in admiration. Some of Popham’s activities resulted in official praise for his contributions to Britain’s naval victories, some went horribly, horribly wrong. Some were dubiously legal and some, Reiter suggests, were straightforwardly criminal. Popham seems to have spent a disproportionate amount of his time at courts martial, where his early interest in law was deployed in defences of breathtaking audacity, sometimes allowing him to talk his way out of trouble and sometimes digging himself deeper into it. As his career progressed, he spent time ingratiating himself with politicians and served as an MP himself, occasionally making lengthy speeches to defend his actions when they had become so outrageous that they drew the attention of Parliament.
It can be a difficult story to follow. Popham was not always entirely honest and some of his more controversial actions were concealed in a storm of verbiage that has clearly kept Reiter trapped in the National Archives for weeks.
In a career filled with stand-out moments, Popham is probably best remembered for two things. He developed the navy’s flag codes, most famously used when Nelson told the fleet that he expected every man to do his duty, and he took it upon himself to invade Buenos Aires, on the grounds that he was supposed to be in Cape Town and BsAs was so nearby that it would have been rude not to.
I admit an interest here. Popham features in my first book about James Burke, Burke in the Land of Silver, when he is on that infamous South American escapade. Whether he was just being Popham and mounting an invasion off his own bat or whether he had secret orders either encouraging him or directly telling him to do it, is one of history’s mysteries. Reiter is pretty sure he was on his own. I have my doubts, and I think that there is evidence to support his claim. But I’m biased. In Burke in the Land of Silver, I blame the army for the expedition’s ultimate failure and I back Popham.
Blaming the army when anything went wrong was a favourite Popham tactic.
Popham was an expert in combined operations at a time when they were even more chaotic than they are now – and inter-service tensions mean that combined ops are often a nightmare. Walcheren (in the Netherlands), which Napoleonic War enthusiasts can get very excited about, was a historic debacle on a grand scale. Popham was heavily involved. When it was going well, he claimed to be the mastermind behind the entire thing. When it failed (with around 4,000 dead of disease any many others desperately ill), it was all the army’s fault. Fortunately for him, the army was headed by John Pitt, Earl of Chatham, the subject of a previous Reiter biography, The Late Lord. Chatham was everything that Popham was not: solid, dull, not gifted with a great imagination, prone to idleness and a man of honour and probity. He was horribly ill-prepared to cope with the opprobrium directed at him by Popham and the naval commander who blamed poor Chatham for everything. The Earl took the fall, but Popham’s career never really recovered.
John Pitt, Earl of Chatham
Sidelined by the navy, Popham was sent to Spain to harass French forces in coastal areas and provide secure supply lines to Wellington. He proved really good at this but, as so often, over-reached himself, interfering in areas where his assistance was neither required nor appreciated and often alienating the people he worked alongside. (His repeated insistence in referring to the guerillas fighting alongside the British as “brigands” did not go down well.)
Having annoyed almost everyone who mattered, Popham ended up carrying senior diplomats out to India (feeding them at his own expense and, according to Lord Moira, feeding them badly). His irritation was taken out on the crew, who were flogged unmercifully, even by the standards of the day, and came close to mutiny. It was not a happy voyage.
Finally made a Rear Admiral, Popham would have been well-advised to count himself lucky and keep a low profile but that was hardly his nature. Shuffled off to a receiving ship in the Thames, his job was to reduce naval stations to a peacetime establishment. Essentially he was ushering in an era of naval austerity, so spending £5,000 fitting up his state cabin was probably not a good move.
His next job was a posting to Jamaica, ostensibly a respectable post but Jamaica was, literally, where the War Office sent irritating commanders to die. Sadly, his son was the first to go, dead at 17, followed by his daughter who succumbed to yellow fever. Ill himself (he had a stroke while in Jamaica), he returned to England in 1820, dying two months after his arrival back at Spithead.
This breakneck overview of Popham’s career comes far from doing him justice. There’s no mention of his various diplomatic efforts, some straightforward, some strictly unofficial, and some verging on espionage. He was busy on the diplomatic front in the West Indies, Russia, the Red Sea, and India. Sometimes he was very successful – the Tsar made him a Knight of Malta – sometimes less so – his unilateral attempts to negotiate with the Pasha of Egypt caused serious political embarrassment.
His hydrographic surveys resulted in charts that gave the British navy an edge over less well-informed enemies that lasted for decades. His involvement with submarines and torpedoes might have done the same with naval technology but his ideas were, perhaps, a little too far ahead of his time.
Nor does this summary cover his actual war-fighting. He was seldom on board a vessel involved in battle but, when he was, he often performed well. His efforts at Copenhagen were also, according to Rieter, “a complete success”, although the controversy surrounding the campaign meant that he did not, perhaps, get the credit he deserved.
Destruction of Danish vessels at Copenhagen
Popham was, indeed, a “quicksilver captain”: mercurial, hard to pin down, potentially valuable, but very toxic. The British do not like people who can be described as ‘too clever by half’, particularly when they are not shy of advertising their notion of their own genius. Popham was almost a caricature of the arrogant little swot who gets on everybody’s nerves. The sheer breadth of his achievements, far from working in his favour, simply annoyed people and, because he was always active, for every great success there was a highly visible failure.
Reiter’s biography tries to do justice to a man whose remarkable life can hardly be summed up in 350-odd pages but she has done us all a great service by giving us a solidly researched and highly readable account of a figure who deserves the attention he has not really been given over the past couple of centuries.
Purchase link:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Quicksilver-Captain-Improbable-Popham-Revolution/dp/1804514411
Burke in the Land of Silver
Popham features in the first James Burke book, Burke in the Land of Silver. The story is closely based on the adventures of the real-life James Burke, whose espionage activities laid the groundwork for the British capture of Buenos Aires in 1806. (The fact that the British had a spy in Buenos Aires is one of the reasons I suspect that Popham’s adventure had official backing.) Popham does feature in the story where he is presented in a generally favourable light. Like Popham, I’m inclined to blame the army for the debacle that followed the successful invasion. Whoever you believe, it’s a rollicking good tale. Buckles are swashed, women — including a princess and a queen — are wooed (almost certainly historically accurately) and villains are defeated. Burke in the Land of Silver is available in paperback or on Kindle.
Picture credits:
Popham portrait by unknown artist. Public domain
‘The Glorious Conquest of Buenos Ayres by the British Forces, 27th June 1806’ Coloured woodcut, published by G Thompson, 1806. Copyright National Army Museum and reproduced with permission.
Earl of Chatham by Robin S. Taylor, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
C.W. Eckersberg’s The British Destruction of the Danish Ships under Construction at Holmen. Public domain
