With the approach of autumn accounts of tremendous invasion preparations brought by Americans and other neutral travellers grew hourly. In the French dockyards artificers were working day and night; everything was ready. A quarter of a million men, it was said, were to sail in five divisions, three against England and the other two against Scotland and Ireland: the landing was to be followed by a general massacre.1 In the face of these reports the King's annual visit to Weymouth was cancelled, and officers were forbidden to leave their stations for more than two hours. "The approaching invasion," wrote Francis Horner, "has driven every other topic from conversation; questions are mooted and possibilities supposed that make one shudder for the fate of the world." All sorts of rumours circulated: that Bonaparte was building a bridge from Calais to Dover, that he was going to transport his army in balloons, even that he was making a Channel tunnel. On August 7th, Mrs. Fremantle walking on the walls of Portsmouth saw a great concourse of people on the beaches, the yeomanry out and the telegraphs at work; guns were firing and many sails visible. On inquiring the cause she was told that the flotilla had been sighted. Next day it turned out that the invaders were only a fleet of coasters becalmed off the Isle of Wight. For weeks such alarms were of almost daily occurrence.
1 Farington, II, 115-16; Granville, I, 434.
It was Bonaparte's intention to cross either on a foggy night or in the sudden calm after a gale. While the British frigates, driven from the Channel by the storm, were lying becalmed, the great flotilla would slip out of its ports and row swiftly to England. Fifteen hundred barges packed with soldiers were to start from Boulogne, Wissant, Ambleteuse and Etaples, three hundred from Dunkirk, Calais and Gravelines, three hundred from Nieuport and Ostend and three hundred more with a Dutch army from Flushing. The boats designed were of three kinds: large sailing vessels called prames more than a hundred feet long, armed with 24-pounders and each carrying 150 men; escorting chaloupes cannonieres with howitzers; gunboats for transporting horses, ammunition and artillery; and— by far the most numerous—sixty-foot pinnaces armed with small howitzers and each capable of accommodating 55 soldiers. All were equipped with specially designed landing bridges. If attacked the flotilla was to defend itself; with the issue nothing less than the mastery of the world, it would matter little if ten or even twenty thousand troops were sunk on the way. " One loses that number in battle every day," Napoleon remarked, "and what battle ever promised such results as a landing in England?" Together with artillery, supplies and 6000 horses, he planned to transport nearly 120,000 veterans.
To frustrate them the British decided to withdraw their main forces to fortified positions covering the naval dockyard at Chatham, while delaying the enemy's advance with isolated defence points. The initial landing was to be made as costly as possible. Floating batteries were moored off the more vulnerable beaches and round, flat-roofed, bomb-proof martello towers—named after the Corsican fort captured in 1794 in Mortella Bay—laid out at likely points along the cliffs to hamper the disembarkation of supplies and artillery. At Shorncliffe Major-General John Moore—the "prodigy" of the Army —was stationed with a specially picked Light Brigade which under his direction was practising a new method of warfare designed to defeat the revolutionary shock tactics of the French. For the present it was to fight a delaying action and gradually fall back on the main regular forces at Chatham under Sir David Dundas, the tall, crabbed, austere Scottish Commander-in-Chief whom his fellow soldiers called Old Pivot from his life-long addiction to the drill-book. Meanwhile the country was to be roused by a chain of furze and pitch beacons which, as in- the days of the Armada, wrere to flash the news from the southern counties to the Pentlands.1
1 If the invaders came by day, the beacon watchers—graphically described in Hardy's Dynasts—were to set light to stacks of damp hay and raise columns of smoke. Wheeler and Broadley, II, 134.
'As the French might land either to the north or south of the Thames—or on both sides simultaneously—two separate defences of the capital had to be organised. As the counterpart to Chatham an immense fortified camp was constructed at Chelmsford—an enterprise severely criticised by Colonel Robin Craufurd, who warned the House that the enemy would not bother to attack it at all but would simply ignore it, pressing straight on to London. A chain of detached works or hedgehogs arranged in depth, he claimed, was the only way to check the pace of the French advance. Fieldworks were also thrown up on the principal roads to the capital, around which it was proposed to build a continuous line of trenches and batteries along the Surrey and Middlesex heights. Here the final battle of London was to be fought, while rustic volunteers harried the enemy's lines of communications from every farm and hedgerow, and the Regular Army, striking at his flank, launched its counter-attack from Chatham or Chelmsford.1
It had been the Government's original plan to " drive" the country in the enemy's path, laying waste southern England. This desperate counsel was subsequently abandoned on the ground that England was too rich a country to denude sufficiently to starve an enterprising enemy and that in any case there was unlikely to be enough warning to do so. To these arguments Moore added a third; that such a method of warfare would promote confusion and despondency and encourage the French. No foot of ground, he contended, should be ceded that was not marked with the enemy's blood. It was the distinction of this brilliant soldier, now in his forty-second year, to foresee in 1803 the tactics that a decade later were both to defeat the French in the field and shatter their communications. The imaginative insight which prompted him to train the Light Brigade in an individual manoeuvre and fire-power superior to that of the French column, enabled him also to anticipate the guerrilla campaigns of the Peninsula. He saw how the enemy's habit of living on the country might be turned against him by a people resolved as one man to resist him. "Nothing," he wrote, "would damp his spirit more." 2
For more clearly than anyone Moore understood how the Volunteer forces which the Government had so unthinkingly created might be used. In open battle their untrained enthusiasm could achieve
1 Pitt was an enthusiastic advocate for fortifying the capital and scouted the notion
that, since London had never been fortified in the past, it was useless to fortify it now,
"If by the erection of such works you can delay the progress of the enemy for three days, these may be the difference between the safety and the destruction of the capital." Wheeler and Broadley, II, 118. See also 129-30; Fortescue, V, 232; Farington, II, 117; Colchester, I, 433; Frcmantle, II, 93; Bunbury, 117-8.
2 Moore, II, 72-4.
nothing but their own destruction. But if they husbanded their resources and waged guerrilla war while the Regular Forces gathered strength, then the loss of London might not prove fatal, and the French army might find a wasting grave in England while the Continental nations, taking courage from the spectacle, invaded France in its absence. Another soldier, Lord Moira, who had experienced the strength of patriot resistance in the American War, stressed the same point. In a speech at Leicester he told the local Volunteers that they should concentrate on acquiring a ready habit of priming and loading and a quick understanding of the orders of their officers. Their task should be to operate in small bodies in the enemy's flank and rear, availing themselves of every inequality of ground; to retire whenever the foe, stung by such gadfly tactics, moved against them in force, only to advance again when his detachments withdrew to his main body. " You must not," he told them, " think this is unworthy of your courage."1
Throughout the tense weeks of late summer, when men never went to bed without peering through the darkness to see if the beacons were lit on the hills, the country preserved its outward aspect of quiet beauty. Farington walking through Chelsea noted the holiday crowds enjoying the fine weather as though invasion had never been thought of. Perhaps it was the unusual sunshine of that memorable autumn that kept men so calm; perhaps merely the instinctive staunchness of a people with so long and happy a history. Among the State
muniments professional historians delved busily into the records of forty-five earlier attempts at invasion; but the public did not need historians to tell them that all had been unsuccessful. "My habit," wrote Francis Horner, "is confidence." Even Fox, whose business it was to expose the Government's incapacity and lack of preparedness, confessed himself stout as a lion. "I believe," he added, "Bonaparte will not try, that if he does he will be destroyed or at least driven back at sea, and that, even if he does land, he will frighten more than-hurt us." " When I consider," wrote old General Cornwallis, pessimist though he was, "the number of men that we have in arms and that they are all Britons, I cannot be afraid." It was this instinctive confidence that made Britain in that hour, as Wordsworth said, "a bulwark to the cause of man."
With the approach of October expectancy gathered. On September 29th Tom Campbell reported that the Volunteers were tinder orders
1 Wheeler and Broadley, II, 112-13. See also Fortescue, V, 265; H. M. C. Dropmore, VTI, 188.
to march at an hour's notice. "It will be a bloody tussle," he added, "but let us never think of outliving our liberty." "Now is the time to prove your hardiment!" wrote Wordsworth:
"No parleying now! In Britain is one breath;
We are all with you now from shore to shore:
Ye men of Kent, 'tis victory or death!"
Walter Scott at distant Lasswade, struggling, in the intervals of drilling, with The Lay of the Last Minstrel, felt a new awareness of his country's greatness:
" Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,
Land of the mountain and-the flood,
Land of my sires! What mortal hand
Can e'er untie the filial band
That knits me to thy rugged strand!"
"We are doing our best to prepare ourselves for the contest," he wrote. "A beacon light, communicating with that of Edinburgh Castle, is just erecting, in front of our quiet cottage. My field equipage is ready; Charlotte with the infantry of the household troops is to beat her retreat into Ettrick Forest where, if the Tweed is out in his usual wintry stage of flood, she may weather out a descent from Ostend."1 Wordsworth on two successive Sundays tramped over the Westmorland fells with the men of Grasmere to offer his services and don uniform. " I have no other hope," his sister told her friends, " than that they will not be called out of these quiet, far-off places except in the case of the French being successful after their landing, and in that case what matter? We may all go together."2
Every preparation which a tardy Government and a remiss, peace-loving people could make was now made. The magistrates were appointed to sit daily to give orders, regulate ale-houses and arrest suspicious persons, aliens were to register within eighteen days, and a General Fast was appointed for October 19th and "observed with the utmost decorum." On that day every church in the country was packed with Volunteers; at St. Paul's, where the Lord Mayor and Corporation attended in state, thousands of scarlet-coated shopkeepers and apprentices crowded under the dome after the sermon to take the oath of allegiance. On the following Sunday the King, indefatigable in the discharge of his military duties,
1 Scott, I, 204-5.
2 "We wanted him to wait till the Body of the People should be called." de Selincourt, Early Letters, 335.
reviewed the London Trained Bands in Hyde Park before a crowd of two hundred thousand. In the southern counties the Volunteers turned out in successive reliefs for permanent duty with the Regulars, despite misgivings that they would die like rotten sheep from sleeping in the fields. On one evening the play at Drury Lane had to be cancelled owing to the number of performers on military duty.1 "Oh, what a fagging work this volunteering is!" wrote the author of "Hohenlinden," "eight hours under a musket I"; a law student confessed it a "sad time for the Goddess of Special Pleading," and reflected wistfully that but for the restless ambition of one man he might be climbing the Alps or wandering in the ruins of the Roman capitol.
Volunteer officers were warned to carry their field-equipment and sleep and mess on exactly the same terms as their men, and detailed instructions were issued for opposing the enemy's landing. Instead of wasting their fire like the French on the Aboukir beaches, Volunteers were to wait. till the invaders sprang ashore from crowded boats and then shatter them with a well-directed volley, following up with the bayonet before they could recover. " Steadily obeying orders, restraining their impetuosity and fighting with the cool, determined courage of their native minds, instead of imitating the intoxicated and blind fury of their enemy," ran the Orders of the 1st Royal Edinburghs, " this regiment may hope to render essential service."
By October 7th Farington thought invasion would come within a fortnight: "God grant us a good delivery!" wrote Windham to Cobbett. The Prime Minister was almost beside himself with anxiety for the Prince of Wales who, nettled by his father's refusal to entrust him with a command, insisted on going down to Brighton to lead the local Volunteers. Pitt at Walmer, enduring the fatigue of a drill sergeant at successive parades often fifteen or twenty miles distant from each other, was even more exposed, being "in the most dangerous place in the whole kingdom." The attack, he believed, would come immediately after the 20th; his niece, Hester Stanhope, now keeping house for him, expected it every night. Even far inland men felt themselves threatened; the Marquis of Buckingham at Stowe thought that the Dutch contingent, landing at Lynn and Wisbech, would cover the thirty miles to Peterborough in a day and arm the French prisoners at Norman Cross. It was generally supposed that the gentry were to be murdered by specially picked ruffians; such tales, wrote Lord Cornwallis, were enough to frighten a poor countryman out of his wits. At Silson, in the heart of
1 Bannister, II, 110.
Whittlebury Forest—as far from the sea as any place in England— the villagers decided to march as a body with their household belongings to Penzance, the most distant spot they could imagine, with the parish clerk, a carpenter by trade, going before with axe and handsaw to clear a way through the unknown.1
But though even Collingwood with the Fleet off Brest supposed that Bonaparte would make the attempt and hoped that it would not be taken too lightly, day succeeded day and nothing happened. Down at Aldeburgh the alarm signals were fired and Crabbe's son rushed into his room crying "The French are landing and the drums are beating to arms!" and the old poet, like a true Englishman, replied, " Well, you and I can do no good or we should be among them—we must wait the event," and composed himself again to sleep. But when he awoke the wonted scene on the beach was unchanged and there was no sign of any invader. The glorious weather of the summer lingered on through October, and at Eden Farm Lord Auckland's carnations were still in full bloom with ripe grapes and Morello cherries on the walls in early November. And the east wind continued to blow in the invaders' favour. But still they did not come.
The First Consul had uttered his threats so loudly that, when as autumn wore on he failed to live up to them, Englishmen began to doubt whether he meant to come at all. "What! he begins to find excuses," wrote Nelson from the Mediterranean; "I thought he would invade England in the face of the sun! Now he wants a three days' fog that never yet happened." On November 2nd Auckland told Secretary Beresford that though French menaces were louder and more violent than ever, he was growing incredulous. "If the arch-villain really meant to make the attempt, he would announce it in every newspaper in Europe that he had desisted from all thought of it." Others credited reports of republican unrest; in early December it was said that a demi-brigade at Boulogne had mutinied on receiving orders to embark.2 The cartoonists grew jubilant; London ballad-sellers did a roaring trade with a broadsheet entitled The Bellman and Little Boney.
"This little Boney says he'll come
At merry Christmas time,
But that I say is all a hum
Or I no more will rhyme.
1 Old Oak, 47; Farington, II, 62, 160; Windham Papers, II, 225; Granville, I, 434-6; Hester Stanhope, 41-2; H. M. C. Dropmore, VII, 190-1; Smith, I, 3; Cornwallis III, 504. , Nico
las, V, 283; Bamford, 223; Auckland, IV, 183; Wellesley, 1,168-70; Colchester, I.
" Some Say in wooden house he'll glide
Some say in air balloon,
E'en those who airy schemes deride
Agree his coming soon.
" Now honest people list to me,
Though income is but small,
I'll bet my wig to one Penney
He does not come at all."1
But those who imagined that Napoleon was bluffing were wrong. He had never been more in earnest in his life. And so were his fanatic followers. That November a prame was brought into Deal with thirty soldiers, splendidly equipped and full of confidence. They seemed neither low nor mortified at being stared at and questioned by their captors, and obviously felt no need to sham spirits. They simply stated with sublime assurance that they would soon be retaken and that the war would be over in a couple of months. Hester Stanhope, Pitt's niece who rode over from Walmer to see them, found them perfectly at ease and engaged, Frenchmanlike, in dressing their hair and attending to their persons, one pulling up a prodigious black stock over his chin, another giving a knowing air to a giant cocked hat with a horrid national cockade or "badge of rascality" in it. It caused her a thousand disquieting reflections. " Some people say they will never attempt to come here," she commented; "I differ from them. I have seen the almost impassable mountains they have marched armies across." 2
Around Christmas there were new alarms. For many weeks signs of activity had been noticed in Brest and the French Atlantic ports as well as at the Texel; both battleships and transports were known to be fitting for sea. It was believed that an expedition was preparing for Ireland, to sail either in conjunction with or as a diversion to the main invasion flotilla. This was a threat to which England was always sensitive, for Ireland was the Achilles heel in her armour, both moral and strategic. Orders were accordingly given that, in the event of the French warships escaping from Brest, the Channel Fleet was to rendezvous off the Lizard and follow them, either to Ireland or up Channel to Boulogne. A reserve squadron was also
Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 Page 11