Occasional Papers: Selected from the Guardian, the Times, and the Saturday Review, 1846-1890, Vol. 2Church, R. W. (Richard William)
Religion
Occasional Papers: Selected from the Guardian, the Times, and the Saturday Review, 1846-1890, Vol. 2
Church, R. W. (Richard William)
Christianity; Church and state -- Great Britain; Great Britain -- Church history -- 19th century
He was one of the few remaining survivors of the generation which had
taken part in the great French war and in the great changes resulting
from it--changes which have in time given way to vaster alterations,
and been eclipsed by them. He began his military life as a boy-ensign
in one of the regiments forming part of the expedition which, under Sir
Ralph Abercromby, drove the French out of Egypt in 1801; and on the
shores of the Mediterranean, where his career began, it was for the
most part continued and finished. His genius led him to the more
irregular and romantic forms of military service; he had the gift of
personal influence, and the power of fascinating and attaching to
himself, with extraordinary loyalty, the people of the South. His
adventurous temper, his sympathetic nature, his chivalrous courtesy,
his thorough trustworthiness and sincerity, his generosity, his high
spirit of nobleness and honour, won for him, from Italians and Greeks,
not only that deep respect which was no unusual tribute from them to
English honesty and strength and power of command, but that love, and
that affectionate and almost tender veneration, for which strong and
resolute Englishmen have not always cared from races of whose
characteristic faults they were impatient.
His early promise in the regular service was brilliant; as a young
staff-officer, and by a staff-officer's qualities of sagacity,
activity, and decision, he did distinguished service at Maida; and had
he followed the movement which made Spain the great battle-ground for
English soldiers, he had every prospect of earning a high place among
those who fought under Wellington. But he clung to the Mediterranean.
He was employed in raising and organising those foreign auxiliary corps
which it was thought were necessary to eke out the comparatively scanty
numbers of the English armies, and to keep up threatening
demonstrations on the outskirts of the French Empire. It was in this
service that his connection with the Greek people was first formed, and
his deep and increasing interest in its welfare created. He was
commissioned to form first one, and then a second, regiment of Greek
irregulars; and from the Ionian Islands, from the mainland of Albania,
from the Morea, chiefs and bands, accustomed to the mountain warfare,
half patriotic, half predatory, carried on by the more energetic Greek
highlanders against the Turks, flocked to the English standards. The
operations in which they were engaged were desultory, and of no great
account in the general result of the gigantic contest; but they made
Colonel Church's name familiar to the Greek population, who were
hoping, amid the general confusion, for an escape from the tyranny of
the Turks. But his connection with Greece was for some time delayed.
His peculiar qualifications pointed him out as a fit man to be a medium
of communication between the English Government and the foreign armies
which were operating on the outside of the circle within which the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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