The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  Believing France to be in ruinous chaos, Pitt did not anticipate a long military campaign. He underestimated the strength and stamina of France’s new ideological convictions. As the war continued, however, British war aims tended to become identified with her military strategy. Pitt fought the war as his father would have fought it, concentrating upon imperial conquests, keeping control of the seas and subsidizing her allies to fight on the mainland of Europe. Thus disengaged from Europe, Britain would be free to make conquests in the French colonial empire, especially in the West Indies, and to make occasional attacks upon the French coastline. Consequently, possession of the French West Indian islands and the establishment of British maritime security through the destruction of the French navy became legitimate war aims.

  As at the start of most major wars of the long eighteenth century, Britain was cruelly unprepared. Although the seriousness of the situation can be exaggerated, in 1793 the government had only 13,000 troops at its immediate disposal, and found it difficult at first to scrape together enough soldiers for service in the Netherlands. Furthermore, Britain only had 16,000 sailors in 1793 (compared with 110,000 in 1783), although over 110 ships of the line were in tolerable condition. It took some years to strengthen the armed services. Meanwhile, the early campaigns had limited success. In a desperate effort to save Holland Britain sent a force of 7,000 to hold the River Maas, but by 1795 had been forced to retreat. Other theatres were more promising but hardly more successful. Admiral Hood had captured Toulon in August 1793 with the aid of French Royalists, but a British attempt to lift the French siege of the town towards the end of the year failed dismally. Naval manoeuvres in the West Indies in 1793–4 ended in the capture of most of the French West Indies, but St Lucia and Guadeloupe were surrendered to the French by the end of the year; the island of Haiti, wealthy through its sugar, cotton and coffee, was not adequately secured and ultimately had to be ceded as well. The actions in the West Indies cost 40,000 dead and 40,000 sick, more even than Wellington was to lose in the Peninsular War after 1808. Valuable as the colonial acquisitions were, they did not immediately affect the course of the war in Europe. Nor did Admiral Howe’s great naval victory on the ‘Glorious First of June’ 1794, when he overcame the French Brest fleet.

  On the mainland of Europe, indeed, the years 1793–6 were a succession of victories for the French levée en masse against the First Coalition of Prussia, Austria, Britain, the Netherlands, Russia and Spain. The French occupied Holland and Italy and swept the British navy from the Mediterranean. It was scant comfort that Britain proceeded to occupy the Dutch Empire in the east: the Cape of Good Hope, Ceylon, Pondicherry and Trincomalee. By then the First Coalition was fast disintegrating. In April 1795 the Prussians sued for peace, surrendering their territories on the left bank of the Rhine. Austria abandoned Belgium, compensating herself with land in Poland, and negotiating the Treaty of Campo Formio with France in 1797, which left the French in the Netherlands, in occupation of the left bank of the Rhine and in possession of Napoleon’s Italian conquests.2 Even worse, the old Franco-Spanish axis was restored when Spain negotiated an alliance with France in 1796. By 1797 Britain was the only power left in the field against the French revolutionary armies.

  The French plan was now for the French, Dutch and Spanish fleets to engage the British navy while an invasion fleet landed in Ireland. Admiral Jervis’s great victory off Cape St Vincent in February 1797 thwarted the serious prospect of a combined invasion by destroying the Spanish fleet. In October of the same year the Dutch fleet was destroyed at Camperdown. Nevertheless, British security was still seriously imperilled by mutinies in the fleet at Spithead and the Nore in April and May 1797. Meanwhile, Napoleon had returned from his victorious campaigns in Italy to dominate the Directory.3 He was to impose his will and his personality upon Europe for the next two decades. Working on the premise that Britain could best be weakened by putting pressure upon her empire and squeezing her commerce, he occupied Malta. From there he proceeded to Egypt, where he rapidly subdued the Mameluke’s armies. British historians have traditionally argued that Napoleon had India in his sights;4 contemporaries, however, believed that his intention was to partition the Ottoman Empire, of which Egypt was a part. The possibility that Napoleon might be aiming at acquisitions outside Europe, however, began to disturb the chancelleries of Europe. Before he could proceed further, however, the British fleet blockaded the French fleet and, at the Battle of Aboukir Bay (the Battle of the Nile) in 1798, won one of its greatest victories against the French. Napoleon had to abandon his plan of moving into Syria and, leaving his army in Egypt, returned to France, where he became First Consul in 1799.

  With the Mediterranean once more in British hands, the Second Coalition was formed, including Britain, Austria and Russia. A joint Anglo-Russian invasion to recapture Holland followed which soon collapsed into confusion. More importantly, Napoleon smashed the Austrians on the plains of Marengo in northern Italy in June 1800, and defeated them again at Hohenlinden six months later. Austria left the coalition at the Treaty of Lunéville (1801), recognizing the French satellite republics in Italy, the Netherlands, the Rhineland and Switzerland. The Russians had at first cleared the French out of parts of northern Italy but they had suffered reverses since then and they too sued for peace. Russia then organized an armed neutrality of northern countries against Britain and the British navy’s insistence upon searching neutral shipping. Britain had clung onto control of the Mediterranean and, indeed, had overwhelmed France’s allies, the Danes, at the Battle of Copenhagen (1801). By now both Britain and France were exhausted enough to negotiate the Treaty of Amiens in October 1801. By its terms Britain retained her conquests of Trinidad and Ceylon but returned the Cape to Holland, restored Egypt to the Ottoman Empire and surrendered Malta to the Knights of St John. France withdrew her armies from Naples and the Papal States while evacuating Egypt. This was little more than a truce, recognized on both sides as such. The pretext for the renewal of hostilities was Britain’s eventual refusal to give up Malta, but this was in its turn a response to French expansionism in annexing Piedmont to France and in acquiring Louisiana and Parma from Spain. Significantly, the British government, now led by Addington after Pitt’s fall from power in 1801, was careful to keep its army up to a strength of 130,000 during the peace.

  War resumed in May 1803. Napoleon’s immediate strategy now was to invade Britain. Pitt was back in office in 1804, just in time to preside over an unprecedented display of British patriotic resistance. In the summer of 1804 a French force of 100,000 men and 2,000 transports waited off Boulogne for the order to sail. To prepare for this threat, the government mobilized a force of over 800,000 men, no less than one in five adult males. However, the invasion threat did not materialize. By his arrogance in having himself crowned King of Italy Napoleon enraged Austria, which now joined Russia, Britain and Sweden in a Third Coalition. Napoleon thus had to turn his attention east and north, and the threatened invasion of 1804–5 came to nothing. Moreover, Nelson’s great victory at Trafalgar in October 1805 destroyed the Franco-Spanish fleet and ended the possibility of a naval invasion during the rest of the war. However, if Napoleon could not invade Britain he could at least attempt to ruin her economy. The Berlin decrees of November 1806 and the Milan decrees of 1807 established the Continental System, which placed a ban on France and its dependencies from trading with Britain and closed the ports controlled by France to ships from Britain and her colonies. Britain retaliated in March by forcing neutral ships trading with Europe to proceed via Britain to pay customs dues and licence fees. On the mainland of Europe, meanwhile, the Third Coalition was being destroyed by the armies of Napoleon. The Austrians were defeated at Ulm in October 1805, Vienna was occupied in November, and in December the epic French victory at Austerlitz over the Austro-Russian armies drove Austria to sue for peace. Defeats at Jena (1806) and Friedland (1807) took Prussia and Russia out of the war in turn. The Treaties of Tilsit of June 1807 between Russia and F
rance marked Russia’s acceptance of all of France’s conquests, and raised the prospect of these powers jointly dominating the continent of Europe. Britain, once again, was isolated.

  Pitt had died in January 1806, but his immediate successors continued the dogged strategy which he had pursued. The arrival of George Canning at the Foreign Office marked a more aggressive British approach. Naval retaliation against the Treaty of Tilsit came with the bombardment of Copenhagen. Economic retaliation against Napoleon’s Continental System came with the ‘Orders in Council’ of 1807, forbidding neutrals to trade with France and her allies on pain of confiscation of the ship and the cargo, and providing for the blockade of ports attempting to exclude British ships. Their objective was to unsettle the Napoleonic regime in Europe by disrupting its economic base. In this they had significant but limited success. At the same time, the Continental System had failed to bring Britain to its knees. Parts of Europe – the Baltic, Portugal (and, after 1810, Russia) – remained open to British ships. France was damaged much more than Britain by the Continental System; between 1807 and 1809 her customs receipts plummeted by almost 80 per cent. Meanwhile, British trade with the rest of the world was increasing.

  Unexpectedly, however, commercial conflict in Europe dragged Britain into war with the newly independent American Republic. In denying merchant ships of the USA access to the European mainland, the Orders in Council provoked outrage and retaliation in the North American continent. In 1811 the American government passed a Non-importation Act. This caused the collapse of Britain’s largest single market and led to the futile Anglo-American war of 1812–14. Most of the military action was confined to the Canadian frontier, with isolated engagements elsewhere. The damage to the trade of the two countries was so great that they negotiated the Treaty of Ghent in 1814, which largely restored the status quo ante bellum. Ultimately, Britain abandoned the Orders in Council in 1812 after a vigorous campaign of opposition from mercantile groups. As for the Continental System, it expired in 1813 when the Russians and the Prussians invaded northern Germany and when Sweden declared war on France and Denmark.

  In 1808 Napoleon’s ambition, and his wish to deny European trade outlets to the British, spread to the Iberian Peninsula. French troops invaded Portugal and Napoleon installed his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne. Britain could not ignore this latest example of French expansionism and, encouraged by nationalist risings in Spain and massive anti-French feeling in Portugal, poured in 15,000 troops immediately, increasing their numbers to 60,000 within two years. Canning was aware that the stirring force of peasant nationalism might be a powerful ally against Napoleon, and indeed the presence of native troops and guerrilla brigades was to be a valuable asset to the British. During the next five years British troops, led by Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington, fought a courageous, if tactically complicated, war. Although British intervention in the peninsula in 1808 was not successful, it at least diverted huge numbers of French troops that might have been put to more damaging use elsewhere in Europe. Slowly the fortunes of war turned in the peninsula, until in 1812 Wellington was able to march into Spain and in 1813 into France.

  The Peninsular War, however, was a sideshow to one of the great events of modern history – Napoleon’s march into Russia with an army of over half a million men in June 1812. To occupy Russia would enable Napoleon to dominate Europe, command routes to the East and thus control the commercial lifelines of Britain’s empire. By September he was at the gates of Moscow but, finding the city in flames and winter approaching, he ordered the famous retreat. By December he had lost almost half a million men, his disintegrating army the victim of Russian weather and his own arrogance. The allies pounced: in February 1813 Russia allied with Prussia, and a month later war broke out. The Prussians were hammered by Napoleon’s armies at Lutzen and Bautzen, and the French armies occupied Dresden. Prussia was at the feet of France but Napoleon agreed to an armistice. This gave the allies a breathing space before inflicting one of the great defeats of the war on the French at the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig in October 1813, which broke French predominance in Germany. This was a real turning point. For the first time since 1795 the allies had presented a united front and had acquired at last some hope of breaking Napoleon’s grip on Europe. The French retreated to the boundaries of France. At about the same time, Wellington cleared the French out of southern Spain at the Battle of Vitoria in June 1813, and by the end of the year had invaded France from the south-west.

  The diplomats were now beginning to look forward to the shape of Europe after the war. At the Treaty of Chaumont in March 1814 the four allied powers – Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia – formed the Grand Alliance. Pledging to retain 150,000 men in the field until France was finally defeated, they defined the aims of the war as independence for Holland and Switzerland, a free Spain under the Bourbon dynasty and a confederated Germany. Remarkably, they also pledged to remain in alliance for twenty years after the war. A few weeks after the treaty was published the allies entered Paris and Napoleon abdicated to Elba. In May 1814 the dominant statesmen, Castlereagh for Britain and Metternich for Austria, led the peace negotiations at Paris to a successful conclusion. France had to accept the boundaries of 1792 and the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty. French claims to the Low Countries, Germany, Italy, Malta and Switzerland were withdrawn and Britain took Mauritius, St Lucia and Tobago. Finally, further meetings of the Great Powers would seek to establish a ‘system of real and permanent balance of power’, a reference to the future Congress system. The wider settlement of Europe was deferred to a meeting at Vienna which convened in September 1814.

  It was during the Congress of Vienna that Napoleon escaped from Elba and received a hero’s welcome on the roads to Paris. On his arrival there he promised to rule as a constitutional monarch, but Europe was now weary of Bonaparte. In the dramatic final act, Britain and Prussia defeated the French armies at Waterloo on 18 June. The peace terms were correspondingly stiffened against France. Castlereagh’s broad strategy was to ensure European stability by strengthening Austria and Prussia as bulwarks against the possibility of a revived France, by merging Holland and Belgium into a new kingdom of the Netherlands and, as a further buffer against French power, to merge the republic of Genoa into Piedmont. As is always remarked, the Treaty of Vienna took little account of national feeling. Hence Venetia was given to Austria in compensation for Belgium, while Denmark, which had remained loyal to Bonaparte, surrendered Norway to Sweden, which lost Finland to Russia. The states of Germany were aggregated into a confederation of thirty-eight states under the presidency of Austria. The peace terms were particularly satisfying for Britain, although she was careful not to go too far and take too much. Widespread resentment had already been aroused by the Orders in Council and by British reluctance to commit mass armies to European soil. Consequently Java, a wealthy colony, and only recently conquered by Sir Stamford Raffles, was returned to Holland, and Martinique and Guadeloupe were returned to France. However, Britain retained Tobago and Dutch Guiana for purely commercial reasons. Other gains were made for a mixture of strategic and commercial reasons. Britain took Malta, thus greatly facilitating her naval control of the Mediterranean. She retained the harbour in St Lucia, to facilitate her control of the West Indies. Most vitally, she retained the Cape of Good Hope and Mauritius, which gave her command of the sea route to the east. When to all this is added the existing British settlements in Canada, Australia and her political and commercial predominance in India, Britain’s status as a world power was indisputable.

  For another seven years the experience of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars continued to dominate European and indeed, British diplomacy. In wishing to reinforce the power of the great empires of Europe, Castlereagh revealed his traditional caste of mind. It was never his intention to sympathize with liberal movements nor to give any encouragement to revolutionary groups. He maintained the customary British abhorrence of a single power dominating Europe and
he was anxious to restrict both French and Russian ambitions in the post-war years. His object was to maintain peace in Europe after a generation of war, a peace in which Britain could trade and prosper. He was anxious for the Vienna settlement to be strengthened by peaceful collaboration and consultation. The Holy Alliance of 1815 between Russia, Austria and Prussia worried Castlereagh because the three monarchs who conceived the alliance, and the succession of European congresses to which it gave rise, clearly intended it to be a vehicle for suppressing nationalist and revolutionary movements. The Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818 performed useful work in ending the allied occupation of France and restoring that country to the concert of Europe. At the Congress of Troppau in 1820, however, he strongly opposed Tsar Alexander I’s policy of collective interventions against democratic movements in Spain, Portugal and Naples. These were ‘domestic upsets’ which did not endanger the security of Europe. A further Congress at Laibach in 1821 stumbled over the same difficulty. The outbreak of a revolt in Greece raised the dangerous prospect of Russian intervention in the ailing Turkish Empire. Before the next Congress began at Verona in 1822 Castlereagh was dead. His successor, Canning, was even more suspicious of European entanglements, and bitter in his condemnation of the principle of collective intervention in the internal affairs of European states. By this time the Congress system was in terminal decline. Britain retreated from European involvements and into her more familiar position as a detached, imperial power. By now, however, she was noticeably stronger than she had been at the beginning of the revolutionary period, emerging from the ordeal of the revolutionary wars covered in success.

  To what did Britain owe her success? It was hardly the quality of her political leadership, still less the virtues of her grand strategy that had achieved such a satisfactory outcome. She owed her success to other factors: her ability to deploy large numbers of men, the consistent performance of her navy, the economic expansion which characterized most of the revolutionary period and, perhaps most of all, the almost unbelievable financial resources which she was able to muster.