5 - Patriotism, Piety and Patronage: Evangelicals and the Royal Navy

Summary

The naval action at the Basque Roads in April 1809 was not Admiral James Gambier's finest hour. With the French Atlantic fleet at his mercy he havered, refusing to commit his main force even when fireships commanded by the dashing young firebrand Thomas Cochrane (1775–1860) caused panic. Or so caricaturists had it. STERNHOLD and HOPKINS at SEA or a Stave out of Time, published by S.W. Fores of Piccadilly in August, has Gambier droning through an uninspiring psalm while Cochrane begs him in vain to capitalize on French confusion. On the wall is a chart not of the French coast but of the Holy Land. A lank-haired chaplain holds up his hands in horror at the interruption, lamenting that Cochrane ‘is quite insensible of the beauties of Divine Poetry’! Rumours abounded that ‘Dismal Jimmy’ Gambier had busied himself marshalling his sailors for church parade. Naturally, he requested a court-martial to clear his name. It was followed anxiously by Evangelicals, who saw it as a trial not just of Gambier's actions but his beliefs, too, and hailed his acquittal as a double vindication. Minutes taken by the shorthand writer and BFBS activist W.B. Gurney (1777–1855) were rushed into print, while Wilberforce praised his friend as ‘a true specimen of Christian heroism’. While the episode has often been taken to show that Gambier and those like him were ‘more fitted for the organ-loft than the quarter-deck’, this should be treated with scepticism. There were plenty of celebrated officers who were known to combine piety with professional skill, men like Sir James Saumarez (1757–1836), Jahleel Brenton (1770–1844) and James Hillyar (1769–1843). Indeed, Evangelicals were sensitive about Gambier precisely because they set so much store by the equation of piety with professionalism, a connection that the movement's publicists had painstakingly forged in the preceding decade. Perceptions of the affair have, moreover, been warped by Cochrane's self-justifying autobiography and his many modern acolytes. Among his fellow professionals he was not popular: they found him insufferably arrogant and, whatever they thought about Gambier, deplored Cochrane's misuse of a parliamentary seat as a bully-pulpit against a brother officer.