He appears to have served with the Guard during part of the campaign of 1757. His health was then delicate, and his parents "determined to remove him from the service—a step attended by no small difficulties."[1]
This "removal" was hurriedly and safely effected, so hurriedly that the copy of Locke was not put in the parcels sent after him to Hamburg by his mother; "she, dear woman, knew no other wants than good linen and clothing."
Thus, at last, the young William Herschel, the son of an oboe-player in the King's Guard, is launched in life for himself, in the year 1757, at the age of nineteen.
All his equipment is the "good linen and clothing," a knowledge of French, Latin, and English, some skill in playing the violin, the organ, and the oboe, and an "uncommon precipitancy" in doing what there is to be done.
- ↑ Memoir of Carolina Herschel, p. 10. Sir George Airy, Astronomer Royal, relates in the Academy that this "removal" was a desertion, as he was told by the Duke of Sussex that on the first visit of Herschel to the king, after the discovery of the Georgium Sidus, the pardon of Herschel was handed to him by the king himself, written out in due form.
