For obvious reasons the use of red-hot shot at sea had always alarmed the men who sailed wooden vessels, but Hastings had seen too clearly for himself the effects it could have on ships not to believe there were technical solutions to the dangers. ‘Of the destructive effect of hot shot on an enemy’s ship,’ he told Byron,
it is scarcely necessary for me to speak. The destruction of the Spanish fleet before Gibraltar is well known. But if I may be permitted to relate an example which came under my proper observation, it will perhaps tend to corroborate others. At New Orleans the Americans had a ship and schooner in the Mississippi that flanked our lines. In the commencement we had no cannon. However, after a couple of days, two field-pieces of 4 or 6lb and a howitzer were erected in battery. In ten minutes the schooner was on fire, and her comrade, seeing the effect of the hot shot, cut her cable and escaped under favour of a light wind. If such was the result of light shot imperfectly heated – for we had no forge – what would be the effect of such a volume as a 32-pounder? A single shot would set a ship in flames.
The risks, too – introducing the red-hot shot before laying the guns, the problems associated with firing shells, the dangers of a shell rolling in a horizontal bore, the transport of shells around the ship – were all more apparent than real, but it seems unlikely that anyone with a boredom threshold as low as Byron’s was still reading. The central message, though, had sunk in. Finlay once remarked that there was not one but two Byrons at Missolonghi: the ‘feminine’ (as he curiously and revealingly put it) Byron who performed in company – vain, frivolous, mercurial; and the ‘masculine’ Byron, all intellect and good sense, who came out in one-to-one conversation. It was this second Byron – whatever lies to the contrary were later told – whose attention Hastings had caught. It makes it all the more of a shame that the two men never met, but Hastings’s letter would bear its posthumous fruit. As Byron moved from Cephalonia to Missolonghi and his own sacrificial death, harried and importuned on all sides, Hastings was about to discover the terrible irony of Byron’s Greek adventure: alive, there was little the First Genius of the Age could do; dead, nothing he could not. All that Hastings had to do was wait. And in the meantime, another and closer death had already brought his vision a step nearer.
VIII
It seems impossible to know now what contact he had had with Willesley in the eighteen months since he had sailed for Greece but Hastings’s departure had badly hurt his ageing father. For many years the old general had been living out his days with a more or less stoical patience, a spectator at a play that had long lost his interest, saddened by years of war, ill-health, the death of friends, the failing sight of his wife and disappointment in his sons. ‘Were it not for the sake of my children I know not whether I should have taken that trouble’ – of visiting Cheltenham for the waters – he had written as early as 1808, ‘after all – for what? To prolong the dream a few years longer – and which dream after all has not been a pleasant one – no, I think I should prefer confining myself to my convenient room, surrounded by my family, books and maps, and strive to spin out this dream at least contentedly if not comfortably – so much for sermonising.’
It would be hard, he conceded in 1813, ‘to quit the Theatre before the play is over and the curtain drops’, but with the defeat of Napoleon and the Kangaroo incident there was less and less to hold him. There is the occasional trace of him in the local newspaper – a bullock presented to the town for ‘a patriotic feast’ to celebrate Wellington’s Peninsula victories, the festivities to welcome the Marquis of Hastings back from India – but from the odd letter that survives, the only consolations of his old age seem to have been laudanum and the presence at Willesley of a little girl, a natural daughter of Sir John Moore adopted by the Hastings family after Corunna. ‘The young orphan who was a very bright, interesting and charming girl,’ Baron Louis le Jeune, a French prisoner of war at Ashby and – in the easygoing ways of a provincial town far from the sea – a dinner guest at Willesley, recalled, ‘was quite the life of the circle which her host and hostess gathered about them. The courtesy and kindness with which I was received did much to cheer my spirits, prisoner though I was.’
It is a poignant and elusive image – how she came, who her mother was, where she went, all seem mysteries – but whatever compensation the young Eliza Moore brought for the disgrace of Sir Charles’s ‘Trafalgar Hero’ it was tragically not enough. ‘My dear dear Mother,’ Frank’s older brother, Charles, wrote from Geneva on 9 October 1823, eighteen months after Frank’s departure for Greece:
This instant a courier has arrived with Mr McDonall’s letter, & the most melancholy intelligence it contains the sudden manner of its communication to me has thrown me into the greatest grief & sorrow – I am fearful to agitate your feelings my dear Mother by giving vent to my own, & I hardly know what I write or how to express myself … Keep yourself up my dearest Mother I beg of you … It is to me a great consolation that no one can have a moment’s doubt that my poor Father’s mind was quite gone …
The new Sir Charles might well have been right – ‘Oct 2’, the wonderfully named Derbyshire Coroner Charnel Bateman wrote in his accounts, ‘Willesley to view the body of Sir Charles Hastings Bart, who shot himself, being at the time in a state of temporary derangement, 21 miles £1.15s 9d.’ – but there was certainly nothing insane about the man who had made his will only months before. ‘I desire my body may be opened after my death,’ he declared, with the same robust, pagan instincts that made him so contemptuous that Bonaparte should have surrendered rather than fallen on his sword,
and buried without a coffin upon the Grove Hill on a spot marked by me, wrapped up in either woollen, oil cloth or any such perishable materials as will keep my body together until deposited in my grave by six of my most deserving poorest labourers to whom one pound will be given … and several acorns to be planted over my grave that one good tree may be chosen [the rusting iron railings still surround a tree near where Willesley Hall once stood] and preserved and that I may have the satisfaction of knowing that after my death my body may not be quite useless but serve to rear a good English Oak.
The same mixture of singularity, clarity and generosity runs through the rest of the will, and if Sir Charles Hastings died insane, then he had probably lived that way too. There is a curious – and very Hastings – codicil disinheriting his elder son in favour of Frank should Charles ever employ their old steward again, but the clause that most affected his estranged favourite – and transformed his bargaining power with his Greek masters – came right at the beginning.
As my youngest son Frank Hastings has been provided for by a clause in the Marriage Settlement I shall entrust him to the care of his Mother and Brother who will act towards him as he behaves and I grant him my blessing and entire forgiveness … I leave to my eldest son Charles Hastings five thousand pounds to enable him to pay his brother that sum due to him by the Marriage Settlement.
‘I have written three letters to my brother,’ Charles told his mother in that same letter from Geneva, ‘in which I urge in the kindest and strongest manner I can his immediate return to England – & have desired him to draw on me for any sums of money he may want. The 3 letters go by different channels, & I think safe one’s [sic].’
There is no mention of his father’s death in Frank’s journal – although there is a copy of the will among his papers – but if it did reach him before the end of the year his brother’s plea went ignored. It seems likely in fact that Charles’s letters did not catch up with him until well into the next year, because by the end of October 1823 he had left Hydra for Athens, sailing north via Corinth with another disenchanted product of the Royal Navy, Byron’s secretary, imitator, traducer and future biographer, Edward John Trelawny.
It says something about the diversity of philhellene life that two men as diametrically opposed in character and ambition as Trelawny and Hastings could find themselves on the same side, let alone in the same boat. They had entered the navy as boys in the same year, but whereas Hastings had served in the Neptune at Trafalgar, Trelawny – to his bitter regret – had missed out on the battle, beginning a downward spiral