CONTENTS AT NORWICH-REMOVAL TO LONDON. I MEMOIRS OF FRANCIS THOMAS MCDOUGALL CHAPTER I. EARLY LIFE-MALTA-MEDICAL SUCCESS AT KING'S COLLEGE OXFORD THE BOAT RACE-MARRIAGE-ORDINATION AT NOR- FRANCIS THOMAS MCDOUGALL, the subject of this memoir, was born on June 30, 1817, at Sydenham, near London, and was the only son of Captain William Adair McDougall, of the 88th Regiment. Captain McDougall was the son of General Patrick McDougall, of the H. E. I. Co.'s service, and nephew of Vice-Admiral McDougall, who received his promotion to that rank after the battle of Trafalgar, and long commanded the 'Edgar,' line-of-battle ship, on the Mediterranean station. From his earliest youth destined to be a soldier, and joining the Volunteers when only a boy, in the perilous times of 1796, Captain McDougall obtained his commission in the Connaught Rangers when he was sixteen years of age in 1800, and was gazetted captain in the same regiment in March 1805. In the intervening years he served in the East Indies and in Egypt under Sir David Baird, was then ordered to the Mediterranean, and was present at the seige of Cadiz from its opening fire by the French, was for ten months with the B Light Brigade on the heights of the Isla, and was with the third division of the army from the advance from Busaco to the lines of Torres Vedras, until the retreat of the enemy to Santarem, when he was struck down with fever and invalided. About the year 1812, on his return to England, he was persuaded by his friends, who thought his recovery hopeless, to sell his commission, and from that time saw no more active service in time of war; but, unable to dissociate himself from the profession that he loved, he became paymaster, first of the second battalion of the 88th Regiment, and subsequently, in succession, of the 7th Fusiliers and of the 42nd Royal Highlanders-serving in that capacity until April 1839, within two years of his death in 1841. He was a popular and gallant officer. That he was popular is evidenced by some handsome plate, still existing, presented to him as a testimony of their esteem by his brother-officers in 1816. That he was a gallant one we may believe not only from the assumption that all British officers are brave, which is no doubt generally true, but from the evidence of a little faded memorandum book in his own handwriting, left for his children, in which he relates that in March 1810, when an attack was ordered at Cadiz against the Napoleon battery of Matagorda of forty-eight heavy guns, he volunteered for the forlorn hope with his company to lead the storming party, and that his offer was accepted. By the treachery of an ally the intended attack was divulged, and the enemy received them in such force that the troops were called off; but he was kept with his company as a body-guard to General Sir William Stuart until the boats were out of range, when, with his men in the launch of the Achille,' he ran the gauntlet of the entire battery and field train of the enemy, through shot, shell, grape, and canister, losing two of his men and one scaman, and the whole boat's crew wet to the skin with the spray of the shot on the water. Whether in these days of guns of precision and improved munitions of war such an THE PENINSULAR WAR 3 experience could have ended with so little loss, would seem improbable. While he was in the Peninsula, Mrs. McDougall and her sister, Mrs. Irwin, afterwards the widow of Captain Irwin, who fell in the campaign, followed their husbands into the field-two of those ladies, the wives of officers of the Light Division, of whom it is related in the life of the great Duke that they did much to keep up the spirit of the force, giving entertainments, at which he did not disdain to be present, riding over from head-quarters for the purpose. Dim in the past, their adventures cannot now be recalled, even were this the place to recount them, but one story remains in the traditions of the family which we may relate to show what sort of mettle they were of. The two ladies were in Cadiz at the time of the siege, and their husbands on the Isla, where they determined to visit them, and started in a smart carriage with four mules and muleteers for that purpose. They probably put on their best bonnets for the holiday; but whether it might have been the bonnets or the gay appearance of the turn-out, it attracted the attention of the enemy, who concluded that the party was one of British general officers going to inspect the troops, and at once opened fire upon them. On the roar of the first shell the muleteers leaped from their seats and threw themselves on their faces among the sandhills, abandoning their charges to their fate. But the ladies were equal to the occasion; they seized the reins and mounted the box, and driving off at a gallop were soon out of gunshot, leaving the muleteers to follow as they might. The piping times of peace might seem a little dull after such adventures. It was during the wanderings of his father with his regiment that the boyhood of the young Francis was spent. For three years, from 1825, they were stationed at Corfu, and here he got some schooling at Lord Guildford's College, and learned modern Greek. He had in him the makings of a linguist; a strong memory, a facile tongue, and a ready ear. |