Cut From Other Cloth
While inspecting troops in Colchester for duty against Napoleon, the Duke of York came upon one man who gave new meaning to the word Veteran.
1811
King George III 1760-1820
While inspecting troops in Colchester for duty against Napoleon, the Duke of York came upon one man who gave new meaning to the word Veteran.
1811
King George III 1760-1820
In September 1811, during the Napoleonic Wars, George the Prince Regent and his brother Frederick, Duke of York and Albany, were reviewing the troops of the Eastern Command on Lexden Heath, near Colchester, when they spied an elderly man wearing a uniform from a bygone age and perched on an aged pony. They asked the division’s commander General John Pitt, Earl of Chatham, what he was doing there.
THE Commander-in-chief* replied that it was Old Andrews, the oldest soldier in the service, having served in the respective reigns of George the First,* George the Second,* and George the Third;* and that he was then on half-pay.* An aid-de-camp was immediately dispatched to require the attendance of the veteran soldier.
“How old are you?” asked the Duke.
“I am now ninety years old, your Royal Highness,” replied Andrews, “and have been seventy years in the service.”
Observing that he was dressed in an old suit of regimentals, His Royal Highness asked how long he had had them? “About forty years,” he answered; at which the Duke took up the skirt to feel its texture, and remarked that such cloth was not manufactured now-a-days.
“No,” said Andrews, “nor such men neither!”
The reply so amused the Duke and Prince, that the veteran was ordered to be placed for the future on full pay, thus rendering the residue of his days comfortable.*
* At the start of the French Revolutionary Wars (1793-1802), the British Army had been reorganised into several regional Commands. The Eastern Command comprised Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire and Hertfordshire, and was headquartered in Colchester. The Commander-in-chief was General John Pitt (1756-1835), 2nd Earl of Chatham. He had been First Lord of the Admiralty (1788-1794) and Master General of the Ordnance (1801-1806), and would later be Governor of Gibraltar (1820-1835). His father was William Pitt ‘the Elder’ (1708-1778), 1st Earl of Chatham, who served as Prime Minister from 1766 to 1768.
* Andrews tells us here that he enlisted in the British Army seventy years earlier, which would be around 1741 and thus in the reign of King George II (r. 1727-1760). He could not, therefore, have served under George I: and indeed, he would have been only six or seven when the King died. That said, he did have a military career before enlisting in the British Army. Hector Bolitho records that as a boy Andrews served in the army of Austrian general Prince Eugene Francis of Savoy–Carignano (1663-1736).
* When twenty-three, Andrews fought under the direct command of George II at Dettingen in June 1743, where the British army defeated the French in the The War of the Austrian Succession, was present in the driving rain at Fontenoy in May 1745 when the French gained their revenge, and was then among the troops drawn off from that campaign to rout Bonnie Prince Charlie at the bloody Culloden Moor in 1746, ending the The Jacobite Rebellions.
* Andrews’s military career did last into the reign of George III (r. 1760-1820). During The Seven Years’ War, he was wounded in the foot while helping to take Morro Castle in Havana, Cuba, from the Spanish in 1762. “Oh, no” he told the surgeon, who wanted to amputate. “I came into the World with Two Feet and I intend to go out with them.” In 1798, when Andrews was seventy-eight, the French Revolutionary Wars were in full swing (that was the year that Nelson won the Battle of the Nile). “All over England people got ready” wrote Charlotte Yonge. “All the men learnt something of how to be soldiers, and made themselves into regiments of volunteers.” Andrews was ready to do his bit again, and joined the Eastern Division. He was still volunteering in 1811.
* That is, retired on a pension equivalent to half his wages.
* John Andrews died on December 8th, 1817, at the age of 97, and was buried in the churchyard of the parish church of St Mary-at-the-Walls, Colchester, where his grave may still be seen.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.