Coleridge in the cavalry.

When, on 2nd December 1793, a young man giving the name of Silas Tomkyn Comberbacke walked into an army recruiting office near Chancery Lane and announced that he wished to enlist in the 15th Light Dragoons the experienced eye of the sergeant in charge perceived at once that here was not soldierly material. He accordingly did his best to persuade the young man to change his mind. He failed; but in the knowledge that the army was in need of men following the French Convention's declaration of war on England and Holland earlier in the year he finally, though reluctantly, accepted the unpromising-looking recruit's offer of his services. So began the brief and inglorious military career of the youngest son of a deceased former vicar of Ottery St. Mary, Devon; an alumnus of Christ's Hospital who in 1791 had entered Jesus College, Cambridge as a sizar; in 1792 had won the Browne Gold Medal for a Sapphic ode on the slave trade; and in 1793 had been runner-up for the Craven Scholarship won by that Samuel Butler who was to become headmaster of Shrewsbury, Bishop of Lichfield, and grandfather of the acerbic author of Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh.

Of course, the recruit's real name was not Comberbacke. He had noticed the name above a door near the recruiting office and appropriated it for himself because it began with a 'C', and combined with the initial letters of his spurious forenames fitted the identifying mark 'S.T.C.' on his clothing. But if, to anyone who knew Samuel Taylor Coleridge, even that minor display of practicality was surprising, much more surprising was the fact that he who was known among his intimates for his 'violent antipathy to soldiers and horses' should have enlisted in a cavalry regiment of his own free will.

The truth was that by the end of his second year at Cambridge, Coleridge's personal affairs were in so sorry a state that he thought he had little choice. His courtship of Mary Evans, the sister of an old school fellow at Christ's Hospital, was not going well, and to his anguish would end in her betrothal to a man of means. Moreover, his incautiously vociferous support of William Frend, a Fellow of Jesus who in 1793 appeared before the Vice-Chancellor of the University on a charge of 'giving utterance to and printing opinions rounded on Unitarian principles adverse to the Established Church', put him in such bad odour with authority that he narrowly missed being sent down.

At this juncture, however, it was Coleridge's financial position that caused him most concern. Not that it should have done so. With a Christ's Hospital Exhibition of [pounds]40 a year, a Rustat Scholarship for the sons of clergymen of [pounds]27 a year, a Jesus College Chapel Clerkship of [pounds]33 a year, and modest help from his brothers, he should have been able to subsist tolerably well. But thanks to his fondness for late-night suppers and drinking parties he soon ran short of cash, and on the ground that 'one feels cold and naked and shivering and gelid and chilly . . . without a little money in one's pocket', he applied to his brothers for an advance. Shocked to learn that he owed [pounds]148, a then sizeable sum composed of accounts rendered by his tutor and shoemaker, and a Cambridge upholsterer he had foolishly allowed to furnish his rooms in an unnecessarily lavish fashion, on receipt of his plea they called him home to Ottery to consider his difficulties. The result of the family discussion was that despite their disapproval of his behaviour they very decently gave him the money to pay his debts, and sent him back to Cambridge in the hope, as he put it, that consciousness of 'the follies of which I may have been guilty . . . will operate to future consistency of conduct'.

He returned via London, spending with his usual recklessness on the way. Unfortunately, on his arrival at Cambridge he was confronted with other urgent debts which, typically, he had overlooked, and since by the time he had paid these he was quite unable to settle all the bills for which he had solicited help from his brothers, 'pure terror and hauntings of mind' drove him back to London. There, in the City taverns and coffee houses to which, as a child of ten, he had been introduced by an unthinking uncle who owned a tobacconist's shop in Threadneedle Street, he spent what money remained. It was true that he made a speculative attempt to repair his financial position by buying a ticket in the Irish lottery with a guinea earned from the Morning Chronicle for a poem about the lottery entitled 'To Fortune'. Yet although disappointed, if scarcely surprised, that his lottery number did not come up, from 20th November, the date of the draw, he managed to support himself for another twelve days, it is thought by selling some of his clothes. It was then that, forced to spend a night on the steps of a house near the recruiting office, he took the decision that would at least make him certain of food, clothes, shelter and a bed. Thus on the day after his enlistment Coleridge was marched away with the other recruits to begin his training at the regimental headquarters at Reading, and in the process to become, in his own mocking words, 'a very indocile Equestrian'.

At Reading he proceeded to demonstrate his complete unfitness for a military career. Certainly, the officers and NCOs charged with the duty of instructing him in the elements of horse soldiering must have wondered what they would be able to make of a man who, in answer to an inspecting officer's question: 'Whose rusty gun is this?', replied: 'Is it very rusty? because if it is I think it must be mine'; or who, chided on his mount's unkempt appearance, remarked that it was a pity that a horse could not 'rub himself down and shake himself clean, and so shine in all his native beauty'.

It also became clear that he was as hopelessly incompetent in the art of riding his horse as in the job of caring for its tack. Unashamedly admitting 'to being thrown or run away with to the no small purturbation [sic] of my nervous system almost every day', he further infuriated his superiors by his inability to polish to the required standard the saddle and bridle, the martingale and surcingle, and all the other components of what he called 'the long etcetera of military accoutrement' issued to the cavalryman.

It was not long, however, before he found a way of avoiding the chores. Amiable and, though patently a 'gentleman', entirely without assumption of superiority, he had endeared himself to his comrades as a 'natural, though of a peculiar kind - a talking natural' who could discourse on a variety of topics with matchless fluency. Whether it was the Peloponnesian Wars, the campaigns of Alexander the Great, the heroic stand of the Spartans at Thermopylae, or the crossing of the Hellespont by Xerxes, the story was recounted with such verve and in such detail that some of his auditors thought that he described events at which he had been present. Eventually, having discovered that he could write as well as he could talk, they persuaded him, in exchange for their grooming of his horse and cleaning of his kit, to write their letters home for them. It was a task at which he excelled - the words poured out in a torrent, 'so that by the time she had got to the fourth page the girl couldn't do otherwise than give in'.

Meanwhile the mystery of Coleridge's unauthorised absence from Cambridge had engendered much University gossip and family anxiety. On his enlistment, however, he had communicated details of his regimental address to acquaintances among the Grecians, the small group of gifted boys, of which he had himself been a member, selected for special training at Christ's Hospital. His expectation had been that they would ignore his 'most solemn Importation of secrecy' and divulge his whereabouts in time for his connections to rescue him before his regiment took the field. To his satisfaction the stratagem worked. The Grecians betrayed his 'secret' to G. L. Tuckett, a school contemporary who had also gone up to Jesus College, and Tuckett passed the information on to Coleridge's brother, the Reverend George Coleridge, successor to his father as Vicar of Ottery and headmaster of the local school.

Now began a campaign to get Coleridge out of the army and, if Cambridge would have him, back into Cambridge. The second of these aims seemed unlikely to cause much difficulty. For as soon as the news of Coleridge's enlistment reached Cambridge, James Plampin, his tutor, and Dr. Pearce, the Master of Jesus, both of whom prided themselves on their ability to know a genius when they saw one, assured his worried family that he would receive a warm welcome from them if he decided to resume his University career. That was not all. As James Bowyer, Coleridge's old headmaster, was willing to commit 'the amiable fraud' of insinuating that his former prize pupil had 'leave of him to leave College' to enlist there was no immediate danger that the precious Christ's Hospital Exhibition would be forfeited.

As for his release from the army, Coleridge must have known that it was mainly through the efforts of his brothers George and James that desirable end was accomplished. But strict truthfulness had never been his forte, and in after years such knowledge did not prevent him from spreading tales, some of which doubtless originated in a haze of opium, hinting that it was one of his officers who was the prime agent of his deliverance. The officer was a Captain Nathaniel Ogle, the Wykehamist son of a Dean of Winchester and brother of R. B. Sheridan's second wife. According to one tale Coleridge first attracted Captain Ogle's interest when he was on sentry duty and the officer, passing with a colleague, quoted some lines in Greek, incorrectly ascribing them to Euripides. The solecism was too much for the scholar-trooper. 'I hope your honour will excuse me', he called out, 'but the lines you have quoted are not quite accurately cited; moreover, instead of being in Euripides they will be found in the second antistrophe of the Oedipus of Sophocles'. Another tale had Ogle so moved by some pathetic lines in Latin which Coleridge had written on the stable wall that he thought himself morally bound, as a classicist manque, to help him to return to Cambridge. But although there is no doubt that Ogle was genuinely interested in Coleridge's welfare, we have it on the authority of Mary Russell Mitford, at whose father's house in Reading he frequently dined, that 'kind and clever as Captain Ogle was, he was so indolent a man that without a flapper the matter might have slept in his hands till the Greek Kalends'.

What actually happened was simple enough. After Tuckett had told George Coleridge where his brother was, he wrote a letter to the reluctant trooper, enclosing another letter for him which he had received from George. These letters reached Coleridge at the pest house at Henley-on-Thames on 6th February 1794. He was occupying the tiny one-roomed building in the grounds of Henley workhouse because, plagued by boils, 'dreadfully troublesome eruptions which so greatly constellated [his] posteriors' that he was pronounced unfit to ride, he had been detailed to nurse a comrade seriously ill with smallpox. It undoubtedly said much for the efficacy of Coleridge's ministrations that despite having to put up with sleepless nights, and 'the putrid smell and the fatiguing struggles' with an often delirious comrade, he managed to bring him successfully through his illness.

It took Coleridge two days to find the courage to open George's letter. When he did so he replied to it in a manner so morbidly self-abasing as to suggest that he had experienced emotional collapse. 'I have been', he wrote. 'a fool even to madness . . . I am lost in the labyrinth, the trackless wilderness of my own bosom. One wish only can I read distinctly in my heart - that it were possible for me to be forgotten as tho' I had never been . . . O that the shadow of Death were on my Eyelids . . . My Brother, my Brother - pray for me'.

It was improbable that George was greatly impressed by this outburst. Nevertheless, he answered with a kind and generous letter. Assuring Coleridge that 'a handsome sum shall be gotten ready for the liquidation of your College debts . . . and the business of your discharge commenc'd immediately', he counselled him to take advantage of the opportunity to return to Cambridge, and to co-operate with his brother James who as a retired army officer was deemed to be the right man to negotiate his discharge.

But despite James's presumed influence in military circles he received no reply to the application for Coleridge's release which he addressed to Colonel Gwynne of the Dragoons. Discouraged by this, and perhaps persuaded that further exposure to military discipline might do his wayward brother good, he seems not to have pursued the matter very assiduously. It consequently fell to the more determined George to press the case. This he did in a series of letters emphasising to Colonel Gwynne the fact that Coleridge could retain his Rustat Scholarship only by taking his Easter Week examinations. Finally George decided to see what a personal visit to the regimental headquarters could achieve. He had an interview with a Captain Hopkinson from which it emerged that a discharge might be granted if a substitute recruit was found.

By this time it was late March, and Coleridge had left Henley to rejoin the regiment at High Wycombe. He was quartered in a tavern from which, delighted to learn that the army had not absolutely refused to release him, he wrote unwontedly cheerful letters to George. Some contained amusing accounts of his conversations with a pot-house philosopher at the tavern who kept him awake 'till 3 in the morning with his Ontological Disquisitions'. Others included requests for guidance on such disparate problems as the amount it would be reasonable to spend on new clothes, and whether it was necessary to write to the Master of Jesus asking to be taken back, or more seemly to await a summons. 'I have', he admitted, 'so seldom acted right that in every step I take of my own accord I tremble lest I should be wrong'.

All his worries about his personal deficiencies were, however, forgotten when on 7th April the definite news of his imminent discharge arrived. Surprisingly, the Dragoons had dropped their demand for a substitute recruit, and chosen an alternative method which, though uncommon, was permitted by Regulations for use in difficult circumstances. This was to grant a discharge on the false ground of insanity. So it came about that after an unofficial payment by George of twenty-five guineas there appeared in the Regimental Muster Roll the succinct announcement: 'discharged S. T. Comberbacke, Insane, 10 April 1794'.

Whether Coleridge ever resented being described as insane is not known. What is known is that he for once impressed his family with the sincerity of his vow to behave more responsibly in the future. In a letter to George from Cambridge, to which he had returned on 11th April, he expressed his determination to abjure wine parties and cut himself off, 'solemnly and forever', from dissipated companions; to rise at six every morning to work for his degree; to practise always 'a severe Economy'; to regard 'every enjoyment, except of "necessary" comforts . . . as criminal'; and to repay the money that his family had provided, not without difficulty, to pay his debts.

Moreover, his satisfaction at being back in Cambridge was so intense that despite the Master's harsh manner towards him at the disciplinary hearing before the Fellows, a manner which he contrasted unfavourably with his tutor's 'exceeding and most delicate kindness', he was prepared to concede that he had been treated not too badly. At all events, he accepted philosophically the punishments imposed on him of a reprimand, a month's gating, and an order to translate ninety pages from the works of Demetrius Phalereus.

And when his University friends assumed that in celebration of his escape from military servitude he would embrace all that Cambridge had to offer and settle down to serious study of the subjects - theology, politics, science, art and particularly poetry- which had occupied his mind from his schooldays, he saw no reason to quarrel with their judgement.

But, as E. M. Forster pointed out a hundred and thirty-seven years later, it was 'dangerous to assume anything about Coleridge. If life is a lesson, he never learnt it. He did not settle down to his Demetrius, he did not proceed to his degree', and in the autumn of that year there appeared in the Jesus College Register a Latin entry 'to the effect that Coleridge went away and did not return'.

'He had disgraced himself irretrievably', Forster concluded, 'and three years later he wrote The Ancient Mariner'.

[Robert Woodall has written for numerous periodicals on aspects of the political, military and literary history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.]