The Royal Navy

The sea was never far away and the navy an obvious career option. Shortly before his fourteenth birthday, on 1 June 1804, Lazarus joined the Ville de Paris as a first‑class volunteer at Cawsand Bay, where the fleet used to lie (there being no breakwater in Plymouth Sound until 1812). The ship bore the flag of Admiral William Cornwallis. Britain was at war with France again and Lazarus’s naval career, for one so young, was an exciting one.

Within four months he had attained the rank of midshipman. It was not uncommon for ships to take midshipmen as young as eleven (Nelson was only twelve when he entered the Navy) and Lazarus would have been one of about eighteen or twenty-four other ‘youngsters’, mostly viewed by the older officers as little more than slaves of the first lieutenant. 

Life was particularly hard for young midshipmen during Nelson’s time: the midshipmen’s mess, beneath the waterline, was not a pleasant place. Salary would have been no more than £2 15s 6d a month; of this, £5 per annum would have gone towards education, received most likely from either the chaplain or the captain.

Battles with the French

Cornwallis’s flagship was part of the Channel fleet, cruising off Ushant, France and Lazarus was present under Cornwallis in August 1805 in an attack on the French fleet near Brest harbour. One William Richardson, who was serving as a gunner on board the Caesar in the same squadron (seventeen sail of the line), writes in his journal that on 21 August, two days after Lazarus’s fifteenth birthday, ‘an engagement was expected to take place next morning, every ship prepared for battle, the ocean was soon covered with tubs, stools, and other lumber thrown overboard to be clear of the guns’. 

After the attack he reports that ‘although several shot struck the ship, we had only three men killed and six wounded ... this was the first time I ever saw human blood run out of the scuppers’. Richardson also reports that ‘a shell from the enemy struck the sheet anchor of the Ville de Paris and broke it to pieces without doing any injury; a piece of it fell on the gangway close to where the Admiral was standing. He took it up with the greatest indifference, and put it in his pocket.’

On 19 May 1806, Midshipman Roberts transferred to the Montague, a third-rate ship of 74 guns, under Captain Robert Otway (1770–1846, later Admiral Sir Robert Otway). He sailed to the West Indies in the Montague as part of a squadron commanded by Sir Richard Strachan (1760–1828, also later an admiral), in pursuit of French ships that had escaped the Battle of Trafalgar. Lasting nine months, this was a largely fruitless voyage and, after experiencing severe weather off Martinique and near the port of Halifax, Nova Scotia, the Montague returned to Europe. 

Over the next two years Lazarus travelled to the African coast and the Mediterranean. He states that he commanded one of the Montague’s boats at the evacuation of the castle at Scylla in the Straits of Messina (the last British-held post in Italy) and cooperated with the patriots on the coast of Calabria. He probably also took part in the defence of Fort Trinidad at Rosas, near Gerona, in November 1808 under the command of Lord Cochrane. He then returned to England with Captain Otway in the Malta and just before Christmas 1808 entered the Revenge, which had fought alongside the Victory at Trafalgar.

Basque Roads

The Revenge sailed for the Bay of Biscay, arriving in the Basque Roads near the French naval base of Rochefort on 24 February 1809. Here it joined the British fleet in preparation for an offensive on the French ships in Rochefort harbour. 

On the night of 11/12 April, Lord Cochrane mounted the attack; the action known as the Battle of the Basque Roads, or Aix Roads. The fleet broke the boom across the harbour and rushed fireships in among the French: a significant triumph for the British. More than twenty Revengers lost their lives in the Basque Roads, according to Jack Nastyface. William Richardson comments that on 12 May, in celebration of the victory at the Basque Roads, a play was enacted on board the Revenge entitled ‘All the World’s a Stage’.

Walcheren Expedition

In the autumn of 1809, the Revenge was one of 245 vessels in the ill‑fated Walcheren expedition. Under Strachan’s command this was an attempt by the British to send 40,000 troops along the Scheldt estuary to seize Antwerp from the French. Lazarus states that he commanded an armed flat-bottomed boat (probably a gunboat) and landed at South Beveland on Walcheren island to assist in the capture of the garrison at Fort Bathz. The troops were decimated by malaria during the long and drawn-out operations here.

One observer at South Beveland recalled that ‘hardly a man there had stomach for the bread that was served out to him, or even to taste his grog, although each man had an allowance of half-a-pint of gin per day’. As illness rapidly spread an evacuation was attempted: 

those who were a trifle better than others crawled to the boats; many supported each other; and many were carried helpless as infants. On shipboard the aspect of affairs did not mend; the men beginning to die so fast that they committed ten or twelve to the deep in one day. 

Lazarus claimed later that he was one of the few who escaped disease, spending four months afloat in an open boat. William Richardson, also present, notes that the Revenge took 500 prisoners on board in August 1809 and was still at Walcheren in December.

The following year Lazarus left the Revenge and in June 1810 was on board the Royal William, the huge receiving ship nicknamed ‘Old Billy’, permanently anchored at Spithead. Here, according to his naval records, he ‘awaited passage to Constantinople’, although I can find no evidence that he actually sailed there. He was baptised a second time however, on 2 June 1810. This may have been done in preparation for the impending voyage. Or it could have been in advance of taking the exam for lieutenant, as on 6 June 1810 he passed for this rank. 

The Baltic

The following April he entered another ship, the Zealous, recently returned from Lisbon. They were off Flushing (the Netherlands) in the autumn of 1811 and in 1812 cruising around the Baltic. Until the end of 1814 Lazarus continued to serve in the Baltic where, he notes vaguely, he was ‘engaged in numerous incidents with French gunboats’. This was presumably in the Zealous, under the command of Captain Boys.

Boys was apparently president of a court martial (number 265) on board Zealous which on 21 October 1812 tried Lieutenant William Elletson King and his officers for the loss of the gun-brig Sentinel. Lazarus may or may not have been aware of this during his time in the ship, but two years later there occurred a trial which perhaps he did hear about. 

On 9 November 1814, a Lazarus Roberts, described as a supernumerary midshipman was court martialled, probably on the North America and West Indies station. Found guilty of mutinous behaviour, he was permanently dismissed the service and imprisoned for a year. 

None of the details tally with Lazarus’s naval records, which state that by 1813 he was a master’s mate (a higher rank than that of midshipman) and that he was in the Baltic on board the Zealous from 1810 until 1815. Also, he did not leave the service and remained an officer, receiving his promotion to lieutenant on 7 February 1815, on board the Falcon. I believe the disgraced midshipman was his cousin, contemporary and namesake, Lazarus Roberts junior, the son of his uncle Lazarus Steele Roberts.

On 1 January 1818 our Lazarus was examined as a candidate for relief from Greenwich Hospital, either claiming or receiving £10 in ‘full satisfaction for rupture [?]’. There is then a gap of a few years, during which time I don’t know where he lived or what work he did. He was in Plymouth in August 1818 though, signing his name as witness at the marriage of his sister Mary.

There was mass unemployment among former naval servicemen after the end of the war and like many others Lieutenant Roberts probably found it difficult to find employment in his chosen career.