Years of Victory 1802 - 1812

by Arthur Bryant

  Pitt had always realised this. But except for Castlereagh no member of Addington's Cabinet had been able to see that, while France remained untamed, the ultimate interests of Britain and Russia were the same. The smaller vision of the men of Amiens was focused on the differences between the two great Asiatic Powers: the suspicion over Malta, the Muscovite patronage of the Christians in Turkey, the growing Russian military establishments in Tiflis and Georgia with their threat to Persia, Afghanistan and distant India. Sir John Warren, the worthy Admiral whom Hawkesbury had sent to St. Petersburg as Ambassador, was a great conductor of such fears. Even Nelson, though a lifelong advocate of friendly relations with Russia, had doubts of her bona fides and expected to see her seize Greece or Constantinople with French connivance.2

  Pitt's first act on taking office, therefore, was to open negotiations with St. Petersburg. The young Czar, Alexander, had recently been fired by his Polish Minister, Czartoryski, with the desire to become the patron of the smaller nations. That spring, alarmed by French intrigues in Albania, he had sent a preventative expedition from Sevastopol to Corfu and had hinted at Anglo-Russian collaboration in the Two Sicilies. So long as Britain declined to send troops abroad and persisted in regarding every Russian move with suspicion, little could be done. But with Addington's fall, an understanding between the two surviving free Powers became possible.

  1 Holland Rose, Napoleon, I, 452; C. 77. F. P., I, 316,319, 324-5; Paget Papers, II, 75.

  2 Castlereagh, V, 76, 253-6; C. H. F. P., I, 316, 330, 332; Third Coalition, vi.-vii., 28; Nicolas, V, 462, 470; VI, 131. Serving in Nelson's Fleet were some Russian cadets. "They are most exceedingly good boys," he wrote to Count Voronzoff, "and arc very much liked."—Nicolas, V, 42-3.

  While the Czar—to Napoleon's unspeakable fury—protested against the violation of German territory, Pitt empowered Warren to promise subsidies to Russia and any other country that would join in restraining France. Believing that if England was to survive, no sacrifice could be too great to create the conditions in which the European Powers could take the field, he went further and promised a British army for the common cause. "We have both lived long enough in the world," Nelson wrote to the Sicilian Prime Minister about this time, "to know that Nations are like individuals: make it their interest to do what is right, and they will do it."1

  Even before he returned to Westminster Pitt had calculated the military help Britain might afford a resurgent Continent. In December, 1803, he spoke to Melville of employing 50,000 trained troops for offensive operations in conjunction with the European Powers as soon as they regained their senses. For the moment, as was his habit, he was being wildly sanguine; months of hard work were needed before a far smaller force could even begin to take shape. But on assuming office, he at once introduced a Bill to repair the defects of his predecessor's Army of Reserve Act. By reducing the embodied Militia from 74,000 to 52,000 and transferring the balance to the Army of Reserve, he hoped, with the help of Treasury bounties and the parish authorities, to secure by the end of the year a small surplus of trained troops for mobile operations. As befitted a Volunteer Colonel he left the Volunteers alone, valuing their ability to release the Regular Army for the offensive. In this he parted company with other critics of Addington's military policy. For he thought it "talking wildly and like old women to contend as Mr. Windham and Mr. Fox that great bodies of Britons with arms in their hands and trained to use them were not a most important bulwark of security to the Empire." Pitt's sole objection to Volunteers was that they could not be sent overseas.2

  Though the fundamental laws that militate against a single Power's hegemony of the Continent were again beginning to operate, the difficulties Pitt had to overcome were immense. The Russians were intensely suspicious, particularly of the British claim to Malta, and, though anxious to co-operate, would not understand the difference between a land Power with an almost unlimited population and a small commercial island putting forth her strength not in armies but in ships. The two nations, as Pitt saw,

  1 Nicolas, V, 65-6.

  2Fortescue, V, 230-1; Fremantle, I, 396-7; Pitt and the Great War, 494. Angered by the lawyer-like insistence of-one of his battalions on privileges only to be relinquished "in case of invasion," Pitt added to the clause exempting it from service overseas the caustic proviso "except in case of invasion."

  were ultimately complementary and could each bring to the common cause what the other lacked: the one armed hosts to halt Bonaparte on his own ground, the other control of the world's sea communications and the financial resilience afforded by world trade. Yet Russia, not content with the promise of a subsidy, demanded the immediate dispatch of British troops to expel the French from Calabria where Neapolitan guerrillas were holding out in the hills. Britain, on the other hand, was fearful of any action that might tempt the French to occupy Sicily and Sardinia before forces were available to defend them. So long as Russia remained neutral, her patronage of the Sicilian and Sardinian Courts afforded their territories some faint security. A precipitate Russian landing on Neapolitan soil might deprive the Mediterranean Fleet of supply bases and open the way for that French drive from Italy to the Orient which it was the common interest of Russia and Britain to prevent.1

  But the chief obstacle to Anglo-Russian understanding was what Nelson called " the miserable, cringing conduct of the great Powers." No nation save Sweden, which lacked the force, was ready that summer to risk crossing swords with France. Prussia, riddled with corrupt Francophils and eager for bribes to satisfy her insatiable land-hunger, could not be relied on for a moment. The smaller States of Germany would do nothing; the.Landgrave of Hesse had even cancelled the annual review of his army on an intimation that it would displease the Tuileries. As for the Austrians, they admitted unashamedly that with 100,000 French troops in Italy, and their own army on a peace footing, they dared not go to war. They did not like the French : aristocrats that they were, it was impossible for them to do so. And they were gravely affronted by Napoleon's claim to the imperial honours of Charlemagne : according to the old theory of Teuton and Roman Europe there could only be one Emperor in western Christendom. But the idea of seeing a French army again at the gates of Vienna terrified them. Though almost every day produced some new act of infamy—"treaties broken, territory violated, the rights of nations trampled upon, murder even committed"—no arguments could budge the imperial Chancellery. Its one idea was to play for time and avoid any action that might make its present situation worse.

  The Grand Alliance, therefore, hung fire. Nor had Napoleon, whose spies told him what was in the wind, any intention of allowing it to develop. It was not in his nature to lie down under menaces.

  1 Third Coalition, 4, 10-11, 15, 19-20, 22-3; Nicolas, VI, 67; Corbett, 9.

  To the Russian protest he replied in his haughtiest tone that, as lie was not in the habit of intervening in other people's affairs, he did not expect their interference in his, adding that, if war was sought, France did not fear the event. Views inimical to her interest, he pointed out, could only arise from evil counsellors in the pay of England. With the tactful brusquerie of the Revolution he also reminded Alexander that he was suspected of having condoned the murder of his own father. Having intimidated those who dared oppose him, he cracked the whip at his underlings. From Prussia he demanded and obtained a categorical promise to bar the passage of Russian troops westwards across northern Germany, and from Austria—with a proffered bribe of Balkan territory in exchange for Venetia—a reluctant recognition of his imperial title. " God only knows," wrote old Lord Cornwallis, "how Europe is to be saved!"

  Having secured his rear, Napoleon resumed his projects for subjugating England. In spite of Nelson's belief that be would once more strike east, he still meant to cross the Channel. But by the spring of 1804 he knew that he could not do so by flat-bottomed barges alone. He had first to secure a concentration of battle fleets strong enough to drive the English sloops and gun vessels out of the Straits of Dover.
r />   For the moment, because of past neglect, Napoleon's naval forces were too small for such a purpose. They were scattered and blockaded in their ports along a wide arc of ocean from the Zuyder Zee to the Mediterranean. At the Texel three small Dutch battleships, covering an invasion force under Marmont, were watched by eight British under Rear-Admiral Thornbrough; at Brest the main French fleet—consisting of twelve capital ships ready for sea—was bottled up by Cornwallis with twenty, while at Rochefort four more were held by five. The six battleships from the Caribbean which had taken refuge in Spanish ports were still there, one at Cadiz and the others in Ferrol where they were masked by Pellew's seven. Eleven more were blockaded in Toulon by Nelson with a varying but generally slightly superior force. A total of thirty-six French and allied ships was thus held by about fifty-two British.

  Time, however, was on the Emperor's side. Twenty or more great ships were nearing completion in his ports, and the Spanish Fleet—after his own the finest on the Continent—had still to be used. With Admiral Decres, the French Minister of Marine, putting pressure on the naval dockyards, Napoleon had only to be patient in order to recover the ground he had lost in building barges.

  Yet patience was the one military virtue he could not practise. Flis temperament would not permit of it. Sooner than wait till his naval forces outnumbered England's, he trusted to his genius to offset her advantage in ships and seamanship. For a short-cut to victory which ignored sea-power he substituted a short-cut to sea-power itself. When the slow course of maritime affairs impeded his will, he laid the blame, not on his own refusal to adapt his ends to his means, but on his naval subordinates who did their best to keep him straight. "There is in the Navy a peculiarity, a technicality that impeded all my conceptions," he complained later. "If I proposed a new idea, immediately Ganteaume and the whole Maritime Department were up against me: ' Sire, that cannot be.' Why not?' ' Sire, the winds do not admit of it !' They always repeated that no man could be a good sailor unless he were brought up to it from his cradle." For, realising the causes of British naval superiority, the French Admirals knew only one way in which it could be overcome. Napoleon refused to see this. He persisted in trying to conquer the sea by the land.

  On July 2nd, 1804, he therefore ordered his best Admiral, Latouche-Treville, to give Nelson the slip at the first opportunity. Leaving the Mediterranean, with the Toulon Fleet, he was to release the French ships in Cadiz and Rochefort, make a wide sweep round Cornwallis's blockading force off Brest and, either rounding the British Isles or running straight up Channel, appear off Boulogne in September with sixteen sail of the line and eleven frigates. " Let us," Napoleon wrote, "be masters of the Straits for six hours and we shall be masters of the world." In anticipation he moved his Court to Boulogne where, arrayed in Roman costume and seated on the ancient throne of Dagobert, he reviewed 80,000 troops and distributed crosses of the Legion of Honour out of the helmet of du Guesclin. So confident was he that he had a victory medal struck bearing on one side his laurelled head with the inscription: "Descente en Angleterre, frappe a Londres en 1804" and on the other an image of Hercules crushing the sea-giant Antaeus.

  During the spring and early summer of 1804—an unusually calm and lovely one—invasion talk had died away in England. Betsey Fremantle "walked with her brats" in the Buckinghamshire meadows, and fashionable holiday-makers at Margate and Rams-gate held alfresco fetes and children's open-air dances on cliffs almost within sight of the Grand Army. But with Napoleon once more at Boulogne and reports of preparations in every French naval port, old rumours revived. The French nuns at Marnhull, Dorset, were woken by Justices of the Peace seeking for arms in their cellars; " we were not more surprised," declared the Lady Abbess, " when, in the beginning of the Reign of Tyranny in France, a domiciliary visit was paid at our convent there under the idea that Mr. Pitt, the English Minister, was secreted there."1 At Weymouth, which the King—still a little crazy—supposed to be the enemy's principal objective, the drums beat to arms one misty August morning and, while half-dressed Volunteers clattered out of the houses, the royal carriages waited outside Gloucester Lodge ready to start at a moment's notice. " But about twelve o'clock," wrote Elizabeth Ham, " the fog thought proper to lift its awful curtain and to disclose to all eager eyes strained seawards, first the frigates and Royal Yachts with sails set and ready for action; then a clear expanse of smooth, unruffled water without another speck of canvas in sight. The French fleet had vanished."2 Until the end of October such rumours continued to ruffle the life of the south coast; at Hastings Lady Bessborough, taking a late holiday, found the camion of the Martello tower manned and horses and wagons in constant readiness to evacuate the women and children.3

  Yet there was little real alarm. The English people at heart no longer believed in invasion. "When rich men find their wealth a curse," sang the marching soldiers,

  "And freely fill the poor man's purse, Then little Boney, he'll come down And march his men on London town."

  The martial Empire which Napoleon had set up in Paris with such pomp failed to impress them. They viewed the new Charlemagne, "that cruel and foolish Emperor," as Dorothy Wordsworth called him, as the same old Bonaparte or Boney—a " little French froggie" who would end by bursting—and the glittering Princes and Marshals of his Court as a pack of beggars on horseback from the Paris gutters and Corsican caves. Gillray portrayed the-blood-stained hag of the Republic nursing an ermine-cloaked Napoleon and dangling before him kingly trinkets to a nursery refrain:

  "There's a little King Pippin,

  He shall have a rattle and crown;

  Bless thy five wits, my baby,

  Mind it don't throw itself down!"

  1 Wheeler and Broadley, I, 40.

  2 Ham MS.

  3 Farington, II, 194, 278, 281; Minto, III, 316; A. M. W. Stirling, Coke of Norfolk and his Friends (1908), II, 37; Creevey, I, 29; Cornwallis, III, 516; Nicolas, VI, 177, 182; Ham MS.; Granville, I, 467, 471.

  The English never doubted that it would.

  Already their attitude to the French had changed. Their new Minister thought far more about an English landing in Europe than a French landing in England. When he authorised additional expenditure on Martello towers or approved the construction of a. military canal across Romney Marsh, it was only in order to release Regulars for service overseas. When he refused to send reinforcements to the West Indies on the ground that every soldier was wanted at home, he was merely husbanding the troops to keep faith with Russia and prove that England meant business. To free his Army for the offensive he even experimented with the invention of an American named Fulton for blowing up the Boulogne flotilla at its moorings with infernals or "Catamarans" filled with explosive: a premature torpedo which, when tried on October 2nd, failed as ludicrously as a conservative Navy had always predicted it would.1

  While Pitt planned to attack, his blockading squadrons kept the French fleets in harbour and the seaways open. Latouche-Treville never got out into the Atlantic because Nelson made it impossible for him to do so without fighting. Unable to remain close to the port in the perpetual Gulf of Lyons gales, the fiery little Admiral tried not so much to hold him in Toulon as to lure him out. He offered him every opportunity to put to sea, believing that once he got him there he would make it impossible for him to do further harm. "If we could get fairly alongside," he wrote, "I daresay there would be some spare hats by the time we had done." 2 This, however, was not at all what the French wanted: their object was to reach the Atlantic and Channel uncrippled and without an action. Once that summer, encouraged by Nelson's trick of keeping his main fleet over the horizon, Latouche-Treville edged out of port with eight sail of the line and gave chase to the British frigates. After pursuing for a few miles he realised that he was running into a trap and returned to harbour. A report of the episode in the Paris Press— the only fruit of Napoleon's first naval design—almost reduced Nelson to an apoplexy. "You will have seen Monsieur Latouche's letter," he wrote, "of how he chased me and h
ow I ran. I keep it, and, by God, if I take him, he shall eat it!" A few weeks later he had his revenge when Latouche-Treville, worn out by overmuch climbing to the Sepet signal-post to watch the British fleet, died of heart-failure. "I always said that would be his death," observed Nelson.

  1 Napoleon, who had previously rejected .the invention, was equally contemptuous, and spoke of harmless explosives breaking the windows of the good citizens of Boulogne with English guineas."—Wheeler and Broadley, 1,-314. See H. M. C. Dropmore, VII, 235-6; Granville, I, 462.

  2 Nicolas, V, 271. "We shall surely meet them some happy day when I have no doubt but that we shall be amply repaid for all our cares and watchings."—V, 275.

  Even had Latouche-Treville lived and contrived to escape Nelson, he could not have evaded Cornwallis's Western Squadron. The ultimate function of the great British fighting force off Ushant was not, as Napoleon, like other landsmen supposed, to blockade Brest but to secure the approaches to the English and Irish Channels. Absolute blockade of a port, especially in winter, was impossible: sooner or later fog or gale was sure to offer a chance of escape. British naval strategy aimed rather at making it impossible for any French fleet or combination of fleets to enter the Channel without having to fight a superior or equal British force. For the Western Approaches were the key to England's existence. Through these · waters passed and repassed the merchant shipping on which depended her wealth, drawn from every corner of the.earth: the great convoys or " trades" which it was the unsleeping task of the Navy to secure. As they neared the danger zone close to the French ports the arms of the Western Squadron reached out to protect them. Its frigate tentacles, stretching far out into the outer ocean and southward beyond the Bay, could feel every movement of a converging foe long before he reached the Soundings. A French fleet could only enter those forbidden waters at the cost of being crippled and probably annihilated by a speedier and superior concentration. For at sea it was not the French who enjoyed interior lines. The blockaded fragments of the French Fleet were always further in space and time from the centre than the British squadrons that hemmed them in.