With a blockade declared, British ships exercised their right to stop, search and, when appropriate, to seize every ship or cargo destined for the two French ports. This factor forced up the price of bread yet further. The hard-pressed general public were now fearful at the almost unique situation where, on the one hand, their vengeful countrymen were gathering their strength to obliterate what they interpreted, incorrectly, as a regional antirevolutionary movement while, on the other, the nation’s traditional enemy was, with allies, assembling a considerable naval force, capable of putting ashore a military expeditionary force of significant size.
The young Captain Horatio Nelson, commanding the Agamemnon, expressed the hope that an efficient blockade would force the French Toulon squadron to emerge to seek battle in order to relieve the stranglehold. He could not have begun to perceive the true situation ashore. Prospects for action, however, initially appeared to be good. Even as Hood arrived, two French frigates ran foul of the Illustrious 74 in darkness. The British ship, commanded by Thomas Lenox Frederick, was not a lucky vessel, and, indeed, would be lost by grounding soon afterward. Her crew still relatively inexperienced, she failed to apprehend the enemy. The French 18-gun ship-sloop Éclair was not so fortunate when, cut off, she was brought to action and taken by the frigate Leda. Promptly put ‘under new management’ the Frenchman was commissioned into Hood’s fleet, beginning thirteen years of useful employment with the Royal Navy.
Sensing an opportunity to gain intelligence on the enemy’s strength and disposition, the wily Hood decided to offer the French an exchange of prisoners, the Éclair’s crew against similar number of British. He selected Lieutenant Edward Cooke of his own flagship to act as representative. The choice was excellent, for Cooke proved to be resourceful. Hood instructed him to elicit any information that would assist him in deciding his plan of campaign.
In what was described simply as ‘a French prize’, Cooke entered the outer roads of Toulon under a conspicuous white flag of parley. This proved to be an unfortunate introduction, as the plain white pavillon was also the banner of the deposed Bourbons and, whatever the allegiances of the French at Toulon, most embraced some form of republicanism.
The British were curtly instructed to hoist the new French ensign (a white field, defaced in the upper hoist by the new tricolour). This, of course, was not immediately practicable, but then neither were British prisoners immediately available. Admiral Hood must have found it intriguing that, instead of informing the British to make themselves scarce on pain of being fired upon, the French agreed to a second meeting three days later. Cooke was able to return with a few ex-captives but, more importantly, with information that sixteen French ships of the line were ready for sea, with five more undergoing repair. From a neutral skipper he was also able to learn of the generally anxious state of the populace, a significant number of which had been arrested for voicing the need of some sort of contact with the British.
Admiral Hood awaited developments patiently for, in blockade, patience was a prerequisite, and the Toulon squadron was, at the moment, his main concern. These were the days when command of the sea permitted a blockading squadron to approach to a point just beyond the enemy’s cannon shot, enabling an admiral to see at first hand a port’s geography.
The Admiralty, as opposed to Dundas, had included nothing in its instructions about occupying either Marseille or Toulon and Hood, therefore, was not allocated the means, although a substantial number of regular army units were being carried in lieu of marines. Respecting the home secretary’s comments, however, Hood must have looked thoroughly at the enemy’s coast, comparing the chart with what lay before him.
From seaward, even close in, the town and arsenal would, at this stage of their development, have been hardly visible. They lay in the eastern arm of a small bay known as the Petite Rade. This lay secure in the embrace of two fortified promontories, whose batteries easily covered the narrow navigable fairway. Wrapped around this already difficult entrance was, however, the peninsula of Saint-Mandrier, the bulk of which was of formidable aspect. Steep and rocky, rising to over 400 feet, it supported heavy batteries that commanded the outer bay, the Grande Rade. These fortified headlands made any plan for direct assault from seaward suicidal.
The spacious outer bay is sheltered from the south and south-west, becoming unsafe only during the easterly levanters. Its defensive advantages were first utilized by Henri IV in the sixteenth century. Under 100 miles from the Italian border, it was also necessary that it be defensible from the landward direction and, for this purpose, the major feature was the arc of mountains at its back. At their highest no more than 2,000 feet, they are none the less, rugged and often precipitous. The continuity of the ridge is broken by gorges and passes of varying degrees of defensibility. The town and dockyard were thus backed by a mass of rock that presented a physical barrier between the port and its hinterland.
Both town and arsenal were enclosed by a defensible city wall, lapped by a moat which was partially tidal. The port comprised two basins, the Old and New Harbours. Adjacent to the former, the Darse vieille, was the maze of narrow streets that comprised the seven sections of the old town, stronghold of the ouvriers who laboured in the dockyard, together with many seamen and their families. At the eastern end of the harbour wall was the quartier of Saint-Jean, bastion of the Jacobin Club. At the other was Saint-Pierre, the power base of the opposing moderates. Appropriately halfway between them was the town hall, for the control of which the two factions had conducted a bitter power struggle. Adjacent to the New Harbour, now the Darse Vauban, was the more recent and spacious suburb of Saint-Roch, popular with the town’s notables and senior officials of both the service and the arsenal.
An early reminder of the hazards of blockade hit the British in the shape of an unseasonal mistral. Roaring out of the Rhône valley on 17 July, and under a clear blue sky, the northerly quickly rose to gale force, raising the dangerous sea familiar to all who navigate the Golfe du Lion. Close inshore, where the effects are pronounced, Hood’s ships fought and failed to hold their position.
Several ships suffered damage, the most serious being that by the Robust 74. This ship, in service for years, sprang and seriously weakened her mainmast. The injury must have been particularly galling to her commanding officer, the Hon. George Keith Elphinstone. Already a post captain for nearly twenty years, Elphinstone saw in this new war a last chance to further his flagging career. In this he would succeed brilliantly, but the beginning was hardly auspicious.
In addition, the Berwick 74, already considered a dull sailer, suffered sundry damage to her spars, including a broken bowsprit. She was obliged to proceed to Gibraltar for repair but three others with broken topmasts were able to extemporize and to keep going. One frigate, the Meleager 32, was also damaged sufficiently to make her run for Mahon in Minorca.
From Hood’s point of view, the most serious result of the blow had been that his fleet was now widely scattered. Should the French squadron be looking to break out from its base, now was its opportunity. Rear Admiral Trogoff, however, had other problems on hand.
While the British offshore reconcentrated and repaired their various damages, the situation in Toulon became more complex. As the days following the Jacobin overthrow became weeks and July became August, little appeared to be happening beyond the circulation of wild rumours regarding the remorseless approach of the republican armies. Radical elements in the town once again began to find their voice. Intense anxiety for the future, matched with food shortages due to the biting of the blockade, rendered townsfolk and dockyard workers vulnerable to street-corner rhetoric.
Within the sectional committees, left-wingers again asserted themselves with confidence while, within the arsenal, the still extant Central Workers’ Committee began to foment unrest. Having let matters drift too far, the authorities pulled them up with a round turn, arresting two of the ringleaders and summarily condemning them to death. Their imprisonment, pending execution, spa
rked disturbances that even included a rescue attempt.
Suitably alarmed, the moderates adopted a firmer stance, dissolving all workers’ committees in favour of a small security committee which was empowered to act quickly on its own authority. The causes of the growing counter-rebellion had not, however, been removed and pressure on the new authorities began to build ominously. Growing numbers of refugees fuelled the problem, each a mouth to feed and each adding to the tales of atrocities committed by the Revolutionaries, depressing even further the morale of the citizenry of Toulon
Powerful divisions also existed in the French Toulon squadron. Admiral Trogoff had become too closely associated with the new municipal regime, with the result that the crews of those ships that had recently arrived from Atlantic ports as reinforcement had largely ceased to recognize his authority. In contrast to the comparatively non-aligned attitude of locally raised crews, those from Brest and Rochefort were still powerfully motivated with Revolutionary ideals and looked to Trogoff’s second-in-command, Saint-Julien, for leadership.
Rather oddly, from the point of view of command structure, Saint-Julien de Chambon (described by Hood as being ‘of a turbulent mind’) was also ranked rear admiral and enjoyed identical seniority. He remained true, however, to central Revolutionary principles and, when the disillusioned Trogoff took to spending long periods ashore, he became firstly the adopted leader of the Atlantic crews, then the de facto commander-in-chief.
THE FIRST MOVE in what became known as la grande trahison occurred on 23 August 1793. Two days earlier, General Carteaux’s forces had taken Aix-en-Provence, and the sections of Marseille, having already seen their armed delegation routed at Avignon, realized that their city was virtually defenceless. The hoped-for collapse of central Montagnard authority had not come about and their only fate was now likely to be a highly unpleasant one at the hands of Carteaux’s men who, in victory, had already shown a penchant for undisciplined and unrestrained savagery.
On 17 August Marseille had sent representatives to Toulon in order to discuss what joint action the two cities could take in their own defence. For the moment, however, Toulon shrank from the unthinkable as Marseille proposed contacting the British fleet, ostensibly to sanction humanitarian cargoes of grain for populations already showing signs of deprivation.
This proposal was, in itself, an indictment of the French fleet’s inability even to contemplate fighting a convoy through the blockade. If, ran the reasoning, the state was unable to fend for its citizens, then those citizens were entitled to fend for themselves by any means to hand. Desperation is a powerful impetus for action.
Urgent deliberations on 22 August involved representatives from regional and departmental level, and it was decided that a delegation, speaking for the Bouches du Rhône département as a whole, would approach Admiral Hood. They would be granted plenipotentiary powers to negotiate not just guaranteed grain shipments but also, and unbelievably, the British protection of the city of Marseille from a French army.
The Victory’s log for 23 August records simply ‘French Carteel [sic] from Marseilles joined fleet’. At that time, Hood’s main strength was laying inside the Iles d’Hyères, in the secure anchorage under the lee of the Giens peninsula, while his light forces watched a seemingly quiet Toulon, 20 miles to the west.
The admiral appeared not to have been unduly surprised at the French overture, the ports and fleet apparently having become his focus of interest. On 10 August he had adopted the official line in a letter to the British representative at Genoa. ‘There is nothing … I have more at heart than to render substantial service to the King of Sardinia’, he wrote. But he then went on to underline the importance of keeping his fleet concentrated rather than dispersed on operations where individual vessels would be exposed to damage: ‘You must be aware … that every place where a ship can put her Head has guns mounted, and a few accidental shot may … make her totally unserviceable.’ He looked forward to the fleets of Spain, Naples and England each having its own ‘distinct line of acting’, suggesting that he still did not anticipate close cooperation or joint action.
The Earl of Mulgrave also reported his arrival on 10 August. He had been sent on ahead to Turin to act as negotiator and now, reiterating his intention to follow his instructions to assess for Hood the situation with respect to Sardinian forces, made also the point that ‘Toulon, Marseilles and Corsica are the main objects pointed at in my instructions’. From the outset, Dundas’s primary objective had been the reduction of the French navy’s ability to operate freely and thus to dictate the course of events in the Mediterranean.
Boarding the Victory, the Marseille commissioners were accorded all usual courtesies but were surprised at the absence of their colleagues from Toulon. This, however, had been due to Saint-Julien who, emboldened by the support of so many of his crews, had fired on the craft, preventing its departure.
The French delegation explained that Marseille had openly declared for the monarchist cause, owing allegiance to Louis XVII, the infant dauphin and imprisoned son of the executed Louis XVI. At a meeting aboard the French frigate Nemesis on 22 August the city’s administration and sections had set up a General Security Committee, whose chosen representative was Jean-Abeille, now leading the delegation.
At this point it becomes apparent that Hood’s duties, as defined by the Admiralty, differed from those intended by Dundas, who appeared to be acting on privy information. Whatever his personal desires, Admiral Hood could do little for Marseille: it was very large and he had not the means. He had, on the day previously, been obliged to despatch an urgent note to the Spanish admiral, Langara, requesting him to be ready to relieve the Royal Navy off Toulon as a shortage of water would necessitate its withdrawal within the week. Langara responded unhelpfully that he could not leave his current location, for he was operating in support of a Spanish army which had crossed the border into the French province of Roussillon.
Again Hood appealed for at least a squadron and as many troops as possible. He also approached the courts of Naples and Piedmont for the urgent despatch of five or six thousand troops. An unexpectedly favourable situation had arisen, he stated and he had not the means of taking advantage of it.
Slow communication proved to be the downfall of Marseille. Langara did not respond until the 26th, confirming that he was acting now with the greatest urgency to withdraw two or three thousand of the best troops (they were later to be castigated by the British as ‘dregs’) to be embarked in four of his vessels. By this time, unfortunately, a column of Carteaux’s army had already broken Marseille’s inadequate defences and, on 25 August, the city had surrendered to its awful subsequent fate.
It is difficult to believe anything other than that Admiral Hood saw in Toulon a more valuable and more easily defensible objective, which lent itself to a fulfilment of the Admiralty’s instructions as well as being more within his limited capacity. The great prize, the French Mediterranean fleet, was obviously vulnerable to destruction by diehards once any agreement became known, and so it was essential to move quickly. There was considerable risk for, from the west, Carteaux was still advancing. From the east, in addition to forces already detached, the Army of Italy was also falling back in the direction of Toulon, a result of resolute action by the Piedmontese, anxious to reclaim Nice.
Hood’s first necessary action was to draft a proclamation to the Toulonnais, based on the proposals made by the Marseille commissioners on the 23 August. ‘His Britannic Majesty’s Fleet … having no other view than that of restoring Peace to a great Nation upon just, liberal and honourable terms’ would guarantee protection to the city on various conditions which included, inter alia, the hoisting of the old national flag (the ‘Standard of Royalty’) over public buildings as a firm indication of an intention to return to a monarchical rule, the disarming of the warships and the handing-over of fortifications to British or allied garrisons. All were to be held in trust by the British so that, upon the eventual peace, ‘the Por
t, with all its ships in the Harbour and Forts of Toulon shall be returned to France with the stores of every kind’.
The wording of the proclamation was to prove unfortunate in several respects. In effectively stipulating a return to the monarchy it clearly went against the wishes of the majority who, while terrified of the route that the Revolution was following, still supported the replacement of the ancien régime.
Hood had also caught the mood of the commissioners who, although they could offer little material support, clearly saw themselves as partners, even allies, in an adventure founded upon desperation. Their conditions accounted for Hood’s insistence that all was held in trust. By definition, nothing had been surrendered and nothing was, therefore, disposable according to the wishes of a victor.
As a matter of urgency, Hood again called upon Lieutenant Cooke, this time to enter Toulon, seek out the missing commissioners and to present the British terms. In view of the fact that he, of necessity, would be the sole British authority present, he was given some powers of negotiation. His resulting experiences were worthy of a Patrick O’Brian novel.
Leaving the Victory at Hyères in a captured local craft at about 2 p.m. on the 24th, he delayed his final approach to Toulon until after dusk. It was overcast and windy and, on his previous trip, Cooke had noted that the French guard was slack after nightfall. Sailing in unobtrusively against the backdrop of a high shore, Cooke anchored and, together with a midshipman, transferred to an open boat which they boldly rowed through the ranks of enemy ships. Making to enter the inner camber they were, however, obstructed by the barrier of a taut chain and, while attempting to negotiate this, they were challenged by a patrol boat. By sheer good fortune, its commander was known to Cooke from his earlier visit. Without demur, he facilitated their passage.
The Fall of Toulon Page 19