The Sun.
London, England, 1862-04-26 00:00:00

strons General Court-martial upon Captain

,OBERT-

SON—the suspense as to what might possibly have
been the sentence of that Court-martial, and the
decision arrived at by her MAJESTY in regard to
that sentence, upon its being submitted to her
MAJESTY by the Judge Advocate-General. That

sentence has now at last come distinctly to view :

he finding being—that on the Ist and 3d charges

Captain ROBERTSON has been acquitted, while upon

,he 2d charge he has been convicted. The sentence by
;he court is, in point of fact, that he be cashiered in

consequence. But by a noble interposition on the

part of her MAJESTY—of course with a perfect cog-
nisance, and possibly at the direct instance of his
Royal Highness the Commander-in-Chief, her MA-
JESTY'S cousin, the Duke of CAMBRIDGE—Captain

ROBERTSON is not o be cashiered. Her Majesty
the QUEEN, we learn from a fourth edition of the
Dublin Freeman, " refuses," distinctly " refuses, on
the statement of the Judge-Advocate-General, to
confirm this sentence." And not only this, but her
MAJESTY orders that Captain ROBERTSON " shall
return to his duty." So—by the generous inter-

position of the Crown—ends, in this highly satisfac
tory manner, that most discreditable and, in some
respects, even most disgraceful transaction. The
court-martial upon Captain ROBERTSON will long
be remembered, in more than merely military
circles, as a trial in many more ways than in regard
to the length of time it occupied, a trial of a really
monstrous character. The case throughout has
been a matter of notoriety. If every a" dead set"
was, made against any officer in one of her
MAJESTY'S Regiments, it was assuredly made
against Captain ROBERTSON by his brother officers
in that regiment. It may be idle, it may be even
extravagant to talk of his brother officers, in the
same mess, as having entered into a conspiracy
against him. Conspiracy may be too strong a phrase
for direct application there. That is possible. But
conspiracy or no conspiracy, there was quite mani-
festly a vigorous determination entered into on their
part—what in homely phrase may be called, we
will repeat, a dead set—against Captain ROBERT-
SON. The Regiment was to be made, if
possible, too hot for him. He was to be teazed
and worried and insulted into retirement, and
possibly from the service. hint like lachrynve.
Hence all those lamentable scenes which took place
at Dublin and at London, in which so many now
well known names were mixed up and appeared only
too prominently—scenes which eventually resulted
in this enormously lengthened-out Court-martial
upon the now perfectly acquitted and exonerated
defendant. Every effort has proved in the end
ineffectual towards the driving of Capt. ROBERTSON
from the army, or even from his (to him) extremely
uncomfortable regiment. Endurance has proved one
too many fur his antagonists in his singlehanded
encounter with them. The Justice of the Court in
regard to two of the charges brought against him
and the leniency of the Crown in regard to the
other charge, under the peculiar and painful
circumstances of the case—have together led to his
complete acquittal and reinstatement.
But these charges themselves ! Does anyone re-
member exactly what they were ? The Court
Martial was so tediously spun out from day to day,
from week to week, that in the maze of evidence
the majority could not but lose the clue leading the
more observant on through the windings and twist-
ings of the inquiry into the very heart of the
labyrinth. Looking back through all the
haze of these recollections the case stands out
before our own remembrance distinctly thus :
—Colonel DICKSON in the October of 1860 in-
sulted Captain ROBERTSON. That was the be-
ginnning of all this hubbub and confusion. It was
this modern "ACHILLES' wrath," in fact, that was to
Captain ROBERTSON the " direful spring" of " woes
unnumbered." The day after the insult had been
inflicted, Captain ROBERTSON sent his friend (Cap-
tain HENRY) to Colonel DICKSON, demanding an
explanation, and more than an explanation, a dis-
tinct apology. Neither explanation nor apology
would Colonel DICKSON in any way consent to give.
He (Colonel DicKsoN) declaring, in point of
fact, that—until certain legal proceedings then
pending should have been brought to a close—
"he would have nothing whatever to do with
Captain ROBERTSON in any way whatever !"
That curious reduplication of denials proved too
much at the time for Captain ROBERTSON'S friend,
Captain Henry. The two " whatevers" impressed
Captain HENRY with the conviction that any
deliberate challenge of Colonel DICKSON would be
useless, after that, under the circumstances! Within
five months from the date of these transactions, that
is, in March, 1861, Captain ROBERTSON, hearing
that Colonel DICKSON had been talking of him in
terms that most people would have considered
derogatory to their character, fired up anew.
Captain HENRY being absent from town at the
time, another fi iend, Captain OWEN, was suddenly,
upon the spur of the moment, deputed to ask the
aggressor for reparation. Again Colonel DICKSON
haughtily declined to have any intercourse with
whatever relating to Captain ROBERTSON himself,
or to the affairs of Captain ROBERTSON. There
was the fact of a reiterated insult by Colonel DICK-
SON, and of the impossibility of any redress being
obtained by Captain ROBERTSON ! Such being, as
the French have it, the "situation," these miserable
details, two months later—that is, in May last—
came to the knowledge of the commanding officer
of the regiment, the 4th Dragoon Guards—Colonel
BENTINCK. The Colonel viewing the matter, not at
all as a peacemaker, but simply and exclusively,
in his military character, expressed his opinion de-
cidedly to the effect that enough had not been done
—" no positive challenge having been sent." There-
upon, heartened by this decision, Captain OWEN
returned to the charge, hastening to Colonel DICK-
SON'S with the challenge ! Again, even an inter-
view to discuss the matter is refused. A written
intiMation, however, is then addressed to Colonel
DICKSON, informing him that unless he forthwith
names a friend on his part for,the purpose of ar-
ranging preliminaries, he shall be at once
"posted !" Not a syllable, in answer to this being
received from Colonel DICKSON—the commanding
officer of the regiment is informed by Captain
ROBERTSON of everything precisely as it had oc-
curred. A bare statement of the facts was in the
month afterwards, that is June, 1861, laid, by
Colonel BENTINCK, before the General commanding
the Northern District, accompanied by a request
that the whole affair should be submitted by the
General to an immediate and rigid investigatien.
Upon a refusal of this request by the General—the
Horse Guards themselves were applied to for the
purpose of :ending this public scandal as between i
" offieLrs and gentlemen ; " but there, also, the
demand was in vain. What thereupon ensued
has been thus clearly epitomised by the Post :
"The regiment," it says, "then went to Ireland,
where Captain ROBERTSON alleges that he under- ,
Went a course of the hardest tyranny at the
hands of his colonel, until at length goaded by i
finding a junior officer placed in command over i
him, and his subaltern removed from under him,
on the Plea that hia society was injurious, he for-
warded through his colonel, to the Commander of
the
30th
of Ireland,septembaerel,elmBa6nld,
he
er
wanesi nsqeunitryf.orOtno
the Farces in
Dublin,
was n formed by and there, in the presence of Col, BENTINCK,
h
Col,
BitowNßlaG, the Assistant