No family that includes Warwick the Kingmaker and Essex can put such a record entirely down to ill-luck, and it sometimes seems as if the Hastings went out of their way to import vices that were not already indigenous to the tribe. From the sixteenth century onwards there had been a distinct streak of religious extremism in the family, and in the seventeenth fanaticism was wedded to real madness with the marriage of the 5th Earl to Lucy Davies, a niece of the Lord Castlehaven beheaded for sodomy and abetting the rape of his wife, and the devoted daughter of that notorious prophetess, Bedlamite and ‘abominable stinking great Symnell face excrement’ of Stuart England, Lady Eleanor Davies.
To marry into one unstable family might be a misfortune, but to marry into two smacks of something more culpable, and to the toxic infusion of Castlehaven’s Touchet blood in the seventeenth century was added that of the Shirleys in the eighteenth. This latter alliance came at a time when some of the old Hastings energy seemed at last to be dissipating, but in the tyrannical and litigious Selina Shirley, Countess of Huntingdon – cousin of the Earl Ferrers hanged for murder, founder of the religious cult bearing her name and, by turns, Wesleyan, mystic, ritualist and damnation-breathing Calvinist – the Hastings could again boast a figure to hold her bigoted own with any in the family’s long and bloody history.
It is astonishing, in fact, how successfully the Hastings clan came through an Augustan age of Lord Chesterfield, ‘manners’ and rhyming couplets and emerged on the other side with all their traditions of violence and excess so wonderfully intact. In a letter to Warren Hastings – no relative but a close friend – Frank’s father once cheerfully confessed to their ‘naturally hot and spicy’ blood, and whether they were Calvinist or atheists, shooting themselves or shooting their steward, hanging rebels in America or being hanged at Tyburn, the young Frank’s immediate family bequeathed to him a tradition of volatility that found its inevitable echo in his challenge to Captain Hyde Parker.
Throughout his life Frank would be abnormally sensitive to the claims of a family that, in its more modest moments, traced its ancestry back ‘eleven hundred years before Christ’, and for him there was a twist that might well have added a morbid prickliness to the natural Hastings hauteur. From the first creation of the earldom in the sixteenth century the Huntingdon title had descended in more or less regulation mode to the middle of the eighteenth, but when the 9th Earl died of a fit of apoplexy in 1746, he was succeeded by a seventeen-year-old son whose well-publicised contempt for women of a marriageable class had soon eased him into the arms of the Parisian ballerina and ‘first dancer of the universe’, Louise – ‘La Lanilla’ – Madeleine Lany.
The result of that ‘Philosophical and merely sentimental commerce’, as his friend and moral guide Lord Chesterfield silkily put it, was a baby boy born on 11 March 1752. By the time this ‘young Ascanius’ arrived in the world ‘La Lanilla’ had already been abandoned, and while Huntingdon continued his philosophical and sentimental education on a diet of Spanish paintings and Italian women, the infant Charles was removed from France and sent over to Ireland to be brought up ‘as brothers’ with his cousin Francis Rawdon, the future 2nd Lord Moira in the Irish Peerage, Baron Rawdon in the English, 1st Marquis of Hastings and Governor General of India.
Of all the generations of Hastings who shaped Frank’s future, Charles Hastings – his father – is infinitely the most engaging. There seems little now that can be known of his early childhood, but in 1770 he was bought a commission in the 12th of Foot, and over the next twenty years enjoyed as successful a career as was possible at that nadir of British army fortunes, distinguishing himself in America and at the siege of Gibraltar before finally rising by purchase and patronage to the rank of lieutenant general and the colonelcy of his old regiment.
With the powerful Hastings connections behind him, the friendship of the Prince of Wales, and a pedigree and personality that might have been designed for the louche world of Carlton House, the only things missing from Charles’s life were the title that went into abeyance on the Earl’s death in 1789 and the fortune and family seat that passed to his Moira cousin. He would have to wait another sixteen years for the minor compensation of a baronetcy, but in the year after his father’s death he augmented his modest inheritance by marriage to a Parnell Abney, the sole daughter and heiress of Thomas Abney of Willesley Hall, a handsome but dilapidated estate with a landscaped park and ornamental lake just two miles south of the historical Hastings power base at Ashby-de-la-Zouch.
Charles was thirty-eight on his marriage, and still only forty-one in 1793 when war broke out with France, but to his deep frustration a Tory government could find no active use for him in the years ahead. The seven years between 1796 and 1803 were spent instead in command of the garrison on Jersey, and by the time his friends came into power, age, ill-health and a growing melancholy had reduced him to a kind of English version of Tolstoy’s old Prince Bolkonski, brooding in his library over his maps and despatches as Bonaparte’s armies redrew the boundaries of Europe.
It is hard to imagine what solace a world-weary free-thinker can have found in Parnell Hastings – ‘a great bore’ is the only surviving judgement on her – but the one thing they shared was a deep love of their two surviving children. It would seem that their eldest, Charles, was always closer to his mother than to his father, but if there were times when the old general thought a good dose of peppers in the boy’s porridge would cure him of his ‘milk-sop’ tendencies, there were no such fears over his younger and favourite lad, Frank, born in 1794 and destined from an early age for a career in the navy.
With his father’s royal and military connections – Lord Rawdon was Commander-in Chief for Scotland and Sir John Moore a close friend – it seems odd that Frank did not follow him into the army, and odder still when one remembers the grim reality of naval life in 1805. In May 1803 the brief and bogus Peace of Amiens had come to its predictable end, and for the two years since Britain’s weary and overstretched navy had struggled from the Mediterranean narrows to the North Sea to contain the threat of the French and Spanish fleets while the country steeled itself for invasion.
It is only in retrospect that 1805 seems the year to go to sea, because with Napoleon abandoning his invasion plans, and the allied fleets holing up in Cádiz after their West Indies flirtation, the only certain prospect facing Frank as his father took him down to Plymouth was the ‘long, tiresome and harassing blockade’ work that had become the navy’s stock in trade. ‘I think it incumbent upon me to announce to you the disposal of my boy,’ a grateful Charles Hastings wrote to Warren Hastings on 11 June 1805, a month after entering Frank as a Volunteer First Class under the command of one of Nelson’s most bilious, courageous and uxorious captains, the solidly Whig Thomas Fremantle, ‘whom you were so kind as to patronize by writing to Lord St Vincent. He is at present with the Channel fleet on board the Neptune of 98 guns commanded by my friend Captain Fremantle. We have heard from him since, and he is so delighted with his profession that he declares nothing shall ever tempt him to quit it – I took him down to Plymouth myself.’
It would be hard to exaggerate how alien and hermetic a world it was that closed around the young Hastings when his father deposited him at Plymouth. As a small child growing up on Jersey he would have been familiar enough with garrison life, but nothing could have prepared him for the overpowering strangeness of a great sea-port during wartime, its utter self-sufficiency and concentration of purpose, its remoteness from the normal rhythms of national life, its distinctive mix of chaos and order, its forest of masts and myriad ships’ boats, or the sheer, outlandish oddity of its inhabitants. ‘The English keep the secrets of their navy close guarded,’ the young Robert Southey, masquerading in print as the travelling Spanish nobleman Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, wrote two years later of his attempt to penetrate the sealed-off worlds of Britain’s historic ports. ‘The streets in Plymouth are swarming with sailors. This extraordinary race of men hold the soldier in utter contempt, which with their characteristic force, they express by this scale of comparison, – Mess-mate before ship-mate, ship-mate before a stranger, a stranger before a dog, and a dog before a soldier.’
At the outbreak of