Admiral Sir Charles John Napier (6 March 1786 – 6 November 1860) was a British naval officer and politician who served for sixty years in the Royal Navy, seeing action in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, War of 1812, Syrian War and Crimean War. For a period he also commanded the Portuguese Navy during the Liberal Wars. An innovator concerned with the development of ironclads, and an advocate of human reforms in the Royal Navy, Napier was also active in politics as a Liberal Member of Parliament and was probably the naval officer most widely known to the public in the early Victorian era.
French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars
Napier became a midshipman in 1799 aboard the 16-gun sloop HMS Martin, but left her in May 1800 before she was lost with all hands. He next served aboard Renown, flagship of Sir John Borlase Warren. After this, in November 1802, he transferred to the frigate Greyhound under Captain William Hoste. The following year, he moved to Égyptienne for a voyage to St Helena escorting a convoy of ships and then in the English Channel and off the coast of France. (In later years, feeling he had been badly treated as a midshipman by her captain, Charles Fleeming, Napier challenged that officer to a duel, though they were eventually reconciled by their seconds.) In 1804–5 he served briefly on Mediator before moving to HMS Renommée off Boulogne. He was promoted lieutenant on 30 November 1805. He was appointed to Courageux, and was present in her in the West Indies at the action in which the squadron under Admiral Warren took the French Marengo (80 guns) and Belle Poule (40 guns), on 13 March 1806. After returning home with Warren, he returned to the West Indies in HMS St George and having been promoted to commander on 30 November 1807, he was appointed acting commander of the brig Pultusk of 16 guns, formerly the French privateer Austerlitz. In August 1808 he became captain of the brig-sloop HMS Recruit (18 guns), and in her fought a hot action off Antigua with the French sloop Diligente (18 guns), in which his thigh was smashed by a cannonball.
In April 1809, Napier took part in the capture of the Caribbean island of Martinique, and subsequently distinguished himself in the pursuit of three escaping French ships of the line, handling the small Recruit so well that the British were able to capture the French flagship D'Hautpoul. As a result, he was promoted acting post captain and briefly given the command of the captured 74-gun ship-of-the-line.
His rank was confirmed on 22 May 1809, but he was put on half-pay, when he came home as temporary captain of the frigate Jason escorting a convoy. While on half-pay he spent some time at the University of Edinburgh.
Napier, still on half-pay, then went to Portugal to visit his three cousins, (all colonels serving in Wellington's army, and one of whom was Charles James Napier, the future conqueror of Sindh). He took part in the Battle of Buçaco, during which he saved his cousin Charles's life and was himself wounded.
In 1811, he was appointed captain of the frigate HMS Thames (32 guns) and served in the Mediterranean Fleet under Sir Edward Pellew, disrupting enemy shipping. Among his principal exploits was the 1813 capture of the island of Ponza, which was a possible haven for corsairs. In 1813 he moved to command the frigate Euryalus (36 guns), operating mainly off the French and Spanish Mediterranean coast.
After the surrender of Napoleon and his first period of exile in 1814, Napier and his ship were transferred to the coast of North America, where the War of 1812 with the United States was still in progress, now commanded by Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane. In the Chesapeake Bay campaign, he took part in the August expedition up the Potomac River to Alexandria (southeast of the American national capital), Arriving several days after the Burning of Washington and the Battle of Bladensburg under Maj. Gen. Robert Ross and Rear Admiral Sir George Cockburn, he was second in command to Captain James Alexander Gordon. The British squadron took 10 days to travel 50 miles (80 km) upriver, with many strandings and damage from a tornado/thunderstorm (after the Washington fires), but on 28 August 1814 before attempting a bombardment, they captured Fort Washington on the north shoreline which was blown up by the Americans prior to the attack. The town of Alexandria capitulated with a ransom paid and the shipping there was seized. The squadron successfully withdrew downriver with their prizes despite frequent harassing American attacks from the shores downstream. During the withdrawal, Napier was wounded in the neck.
He next distinguished himself in the following attack on Baltimore, Maryland, by a British Army accompanied by 16 warships, 12–14 September 1814, under Admirals Cochrane, and Cockburn. HMS Euryalus was involved in the bombardment of Fort McHenry, protecting the city on the Northwest Branch of the Patapsco River that began early in the morning of the 13th. At. the same time, earlier on the 12th, Gen. Ross had been put ashore to the southeast at North Point with his regiments to attack the town from the east. He was shot in a brief skirmish just before his troops met the City Brigade regiments of the Maryland Militia under Brig. Gen. John Stricker at the Battle of North Point that afternoon. After pausing for the night to tend to the substantial wounded and now under the command of Col. Arthur Brooke, the regiments waited outside the substantial American dug-in fortifications with opposing approx. 20,000 troops and 100 artillery at old Loudenschlager's Hill in present-day Hampstead Hill in western Patterson Park until the naval forces were able to subdue the fort and move upriver to attack the eastern land redoubts. The critical period of the attack developed shortly after midnight when a picked British force in longboats armed with scaling ladders under Napier's command penetrated the Middle or Ferry Branch of the river along the southern opposite shore, today's Brooklyn and Fairfield areas of southern Baltimore and Anne Arundel County to the west of the fort with the intention of storming it from the rear flank. Before they could land, however, they were detected and subjected to a withering fire from the still active guns of Fort McHenry and two smaller forts to the west, batteries Covington and Babcock. The British fought back strongly with cannon and rockets, but Napier's force eventually retreated to the warships with substantial casualties, and Cochrane's fleet later withdrew on the morning of the 14th.
Euryalus proceeded to Halifax, Nova Scotia for refitting and then took part in the ongoing blockade of the eastern seaboard of the U.S.A.. Bored by such duties, Napier issued a challenge to the American frigate Constellation, which had been lying in on the Elizabeth River harbor near the U.S. Naval base at Norfolk, Virginia, (since making her only war cruise during the first year of the War) to come out and fight a single-ship duel. The challenge was accepted and due arrangements were made 'in the most gentlemanly fashion', but Euryalus was made part of the squadron that Admiral Cochrane took to Florida and Louisiana in December 1814 in the operations that climaxed in the Battle of New Orleans on 8 January 1815, and before she could return to fulfil her engagement with Constellation news of the peace treaty of Ghent reached the USA.
With Napoleon's escape from Elba and brief return to power, the Hundred Days, Euryalus returned to Britain. Napier's last mission of the Napoleonic wars was to land troops at the mouth of the River Scheldt to guard against the French advance into Belgium.
At the end of the war Napier was made a Companion of the Bath (4 June 1815). He married Frances Elizabeth Elers, née Younghusband, generally referred to as Eliza, whom he had known and loved in Edinburgh while still a teenager. In the meantime Eliza had married a Lieutenant Edward Elers and been widowed. She had four children whom Napier adopted as his own. Of these the second son, Charles Elers Napier, became a naval officer. The eldest, Edward Elers Napier, entered the army, rising to the rank of major-general: he also wrote books of travel and reminiscence, as well as the authoritative biography of his stepfather. Frances also gave Napier two children of his own, a son born in Rome and a daughter born by Lake Geneva. The son, Charles, died as a result of an accident aged five. The first years of his leisure Napier spent in Italy, Switzerland (where he briefly took up farming), and in Paris. He had inherited considerable wealth from his mother's side of the family and spent it freely.