If Graham himself had headed the united force, it is certain that the siege of Cadiz would have been raised for the moment, though what would have followed that success no man can say, for it would have brought about such a convulsion in Andalusia, and such a concentration of the French troops, that the whole of the conditions of the war in the south would have been altered. Graham had all the qualities which La Peña lacked--indomitable resolution, swift decision, a good eye for topography, the power of inspiring enthusiastic confidence in his troops. He was no mere professional soldier, but a crusader with a mission; indeed his personal history is one of extraordinary interest. When the French Revolution broke out he was a civilian of mature years, a Whig Member of Parliament, aged forty-four, mainly known as a great sportsman[136] and a bold cross-country rider. Yet certainly if the war of 1793 had not come to pass, he would only be remembered now as the husband of that beautiful Mrs. Graham whose portrait is one of Gainsborough’s best-known masterpieces. [136] He played in the first recorded cricket match in Scotland in 1785. [Illustration: _Lieutenant-General Thomas Graham_] Driven to the Riviera in 1792 by the failing health of his wife, who died at Hyères, Graham was an eye-witness of the outbreak of violence and blind rage in France which followed Brunswick’s invasion. He himself was arrested--his wife’s coffin was torn open by a mob which insisted that he was smuggling ‘arms for aristocrats’ therein. He narrowly escaped with his life, and returned to England convinced that the French had become a nation of wild beasts, _hostes humani generis_. ‘I had once deprecated,’ he wrote at the time, ‘the hostile interference of Britain in the internal affairs of France, but what I have seen in my journey through that country makes me consider that war with her has become just and necessary in self-defence of our constitution[137].’ Widowed and childless, he thought it his duty to go to the front at once, despite of his forty-four years and his lack of military training. He devoted all his available funds to the raising, in his own county, of the 90th Foot, the ‘Perthshire volunteers,’ of which he became the honorary colonel. He could not take command of the corps, because he had no substantive military rank, but he could not keep at home. He went out to the Mediterranean as a sort of volunteer aide-de-camp to Lord Mulgrave, and afterwards, being found useful owing to his gift of languages--he knew not only Italian but German, a rare accomplishment in those days--he was entrusted with a special mission to the Austrian army of Italy. He served through all the disasters of Beaulieu and Würmser, starved in Mantua, and froze in the Tyrolese Alps. [137] See his diary, quoted in Delavoye’s _Life of Lord Lynedoch_, p. 32.