The Cavaliers of Fortune; Or, British Heroes in Foreign Wars — Context and Discussion

From Private Papers to Public Deeds

Grant repeatedly foregrounds his documentary foundations. The memoir of Colonel John Cameron, he notes, was compiled from a mass of private papers and letters submitted by Cameron's brother, Sir Duncan Cameron, as well as from letters by brother officers and the manuscript records of the 92nd Highlanders. This specificity of attribution recurs: the sketch of Count O'Connell draws on information from the War Office and Horse Guards; the account of the Lacys relies on the Biographie Universelle for dates. Grant's method is to weave these sources into a continuous narrative, but he does not erase their traces. The reader is made aware of the archival seams—the letters, the official returns, the family papers—that underwrite each life. This transparency gives the biographies a texture of evidentiary weight, even as Grant's prose moves briskly through battles and court intrigues.

The Weight of a Single Scene

Grant often condenses complex political histories into a single charged encounter. In the account of Marshal Clarke, the Duke of Feltre, the narrative pivots on a dinner-table exchange in 1815. King Frederick William of Prussia reproaches Clarke for the execution of the Burgomaster of Ciritz, calling it 'the useless murder of the father of a family.' Clarke replies, 'It was an unfortunate error.' The king strikes the table: 'An error—it was a crime!' The scene is not merely anecdotal; it crystallizes Grant's interest in the moral ambiguities of command. Clarke, elsewhere praised for his probity and efficiency, is here confronted with the human cost of his obedience. Grant does not resolve the tension—he notes that many accusations against Clarke were 'echoes of complaints raised by the vanquished'—but he lets the dialogue stand as a miniature of the book's larger concern: the gap between official justification and personal responsibility.

The Rhythm of Rise and Fall

Grant structures each biography around a pattern of ascent, crisis, and aftermath. The Clarke sketch, for instance, moves from his appointment as minister of war through the Walcheren expedition and the Mallet conspiracy to the relaxation of his zeal in 1813. The turning point is often a moment of extreme pressure: the Walcheren fever proves 'more deadly to the British troops than the bayonets of France'; Mallet's coup places Paris in the hands of an armed mob for hours. Grant lingers on these crises, detailing the confusion, the narrow escapes, the swift executions. Then he pivots to the aftermath—Clarke's report to Napoleon, his continued service, the gradual waning of his energy. This rhythm gives each life a narrative arc that feels both individual and representative, as if each soldier's career recapitulates the larger fortunes of the causes he served.

The Irish Brigade and the Song of Exile

Grant closes his preface with a stanza from a song of the Irish Brigade: 'They who survived fought and drank as of yore, / But the land of their heart's hope they never saw more; / For on far foreign fields, from Dunkirk to Belgrade, / Lie the soldiers and chiefs of the Irish Brigade!' The verse functions as a thematic anchor, linking the book's geographical sweep—from Dunkirk to Belgrade—to the emotional cost of exile. Grant notes that the Irish troops in French service 'filled Europe with the fame of their exploits,' but the song's refrain emphasizes loss rather than glory. Throughout the biographies, this tension between martial achievement and personal displacement recurs. The soldiers are defined by their effectiveness in foreign wars, yet their stories are shadowed by the homeland they cannot return to. Grant's own position is ambivalent: he celebrates their valor while acknowledging the conditions—'having nothing better to do at home'—that drove them abroad.

Grant's method rewards readers who attend to the interplay between his documentary sources and his narrative shaping. The private letters, official records, and family papers he cites are not mere ornaments; they are the scaffolding on which each biography is built. Yet the final effect is not antiquarian but dramatic—a series of scenes in which individual choices collide with historical forces. Readers may find it useful to note where Grant quotes directly from his sources and where he summarizes, as this distinction often marks the boundary between evidence and interpretation. The book's structure, moving from one life to the next across centuries and countries, invites comparison between figures who never met but who shared the condition of the soldier of fortune.

There’s something in Grant’s old soldiers—fighting for causes not quite their own—that makes me think of that other distant, dutiful journey, the Atlantic Fleet’s long peacetime cruise. It was service as much as spectacle. I found myself lingering on that contrast while reading With the Battle Fleet Cruise of the Sixteen Battleships of the United States Atlantic Fleet from Hampton Roads to the Golden Gate, December, 1907-May, 1908 — Reading Companion. Different uniforms, same strange homesickness.