by Roger Knight
This circle of administrators with Pitt’s ear ran across government. In addition to Middleton, it included Evan Nepean, undersecretary at the Home Office, whose extraordinary promotion to that role in 1782 by Lord Shelburne (previously he had been a humble purser and secretary to the port admiral at Plymouth) has never been wholly explained, though is probably attributable to Nepean’s long experience in intelligence. Pitt also consulted William Fraser at the Foreign Office; James Harris, later Lord Malmesbury, from amongst the ambassadors; and Thomas Irving and William Stiles, former customs officials internally promoted to the Board of Customs, an important department upon whom all governments relied for its efficient tax-raising capacity. Irving was later to do much valuable statistical work as the inspector-general of imports and exports. Pitt also valued the advice of George Rose, secretary to the Treasury Board, and often talked with the young lawyer William Lowndes, who drafted complicated financial parliamentary bills for him.10
The decisions that Pitt and these officials took in the 1780s – on taxation and finance, investment in guns and munitions, fortifications, docks, buildings and ship maintenance – were to provide the critical underpinning of the long war effort that was to start in 1793. This was the group of men who would bear the diplomatic, financial and administrative burdens at the end of the 1780s, prosperous and optimistic years. None of them could have anticipated that the country was about to be plunged into over twenty years of bitter and costly fighting.
The majority of the British soldiers and seamen serving when Napoleon was finally defeated in 1815 were not even born when Pitt travelled down the Strand to visit Middleton in the 1780s. Of the public servants and politicians who were to take a major role in the Napoleonic War, only a few, such as George Rose and Evan Nepean, were in post before the start of the war in 1793. Some were not in government at all, such as the self-effacing Irishman William Marsden, who in the 1780s was a young man enjoying the scholarly life possible in London and acting as an East India Company agent. In his early years he had seen service in the Company and travelled widely. From 1796 he was to be second secretary and then in 1804 first secretary of the Admiralty.11 Marsden’s successor as second secretary, John Barrow, also travelled widely before working in government, but in the 1780s he was educating himself and tutoring young gentlemen in mathematics.12
Most of the future war leaders and decision-makers were still in their teens and early twenties, being educated at university. The most successful group was at Christ Church, Oxford, where early mutual acquaintance helped form bonds of trust and confidence as they moved into positions of national responsibility. The influential dean of the college, Cyril Jackson, selected those whom he helped on merit and gave them stern encouragement.13 The formidable Lord Grenville was there, to be foreign secretary in 1791. He gave a helping hand to his contemporary Charles Arbuthnot, who, having started as a précis writer in the Foreign Office, rose to undersecretary, then ambassador to Constantinople and finally, in 1809, secretary of the Treasury. George Canning also knew Arbuthnot, describing him as ‘pleasant, quick, gentlemanly and universally a favourite’.14 Canning’s character was more complex than his glittering progress through Eton and Oxford might suggest; the son of an actress, he was to find that the English elite never forgot what they saw as his somewhat disreputable origins, and he remained sensitive to this throughout his life. Nevertheless, under Pitt’s patronage Canning became an undersecretary in the Foreign Office, a notably successful foreign secretary and, briefly in the 1820s, prime minister: he will be a central figure in this history. Canning was close to John Hookham Frere, who shone as a man of letters: ‘an idle man,’ Canning wrote in his journal, ‘[he] can accommodate his times to mine easily, and so of him … I see more than almost any other human being.’15 Frere had an indifferent career as ambassador to Portugal and then to Spain, and his communications, or rather lack of them, infuriated Nelson.16 In 1808 he was blamed for having brought about Sir John Moore’s advance on Madrid, when a retreat into Portugal had been the soldier’s instinct: the decision ultimately led to the retreat to Corunna and Moore’s death.
Two Christ Church men who were to become deeply involved in intelligence in the war were John King, undersecretary at the Home Office for fifteen years, and William Wickham, later spymaster, diplomat and chief secretary in Ireland. Wickham was a particular friend of Charles Abbot, who became a reforming politician with an eye for detail and then speaker of the House of Commons.17 Two later prime ministers were also from Christ Church: Robert Banks Jenkinson, as Lord Liverpool in 1812, and the much younger Robert Peel, who started his illustrious career as undersecretary of state for war and the colonies in 1810.
Some future ministers acquired military experience while in their twenties. As the young MP for Rye, Robert Banks Jenkinson raised a regiment of the Cinque Ports Fencible cavalry in April 1794, and for a time could talk about nothing else, boring his friends. He tried to persuade Canning, recently elected as an MP, to join: ‘He would have me take a troop in it as Captain. It would be good fun enough. But I do not feel the military disposition sufficiently strong within me – and so I have only bargained not to laugh at him about it.’ Not long after, Canning and his friends played an elaborate joke on the young volunteer colonel by satirizing in verse some of his recruiting posters. Jenkinson took offence, and the quarrel between these old Christ Church friends was resolved only by the intervention of Dean Jackson.18 The teasing and mischievous traits in Canning’s character led to his colleagues and friends never quite trusting him, something that was almost to destroy his career fifteen years later.
Not yet in office, these young men had time for this sort of amusement. By contrast, the far more serious Robert Stewart, who became Viscount Castlereagh in 1796, took his early experience of hostilities as a volunteer in Ireland to heart. He wrote in 1795: ‘Our regiment has learned its duty so fast, that they make now a very respectable appearance, and it has all been effected without flogging … I should like a military life.’19 Significantly, in December 1796 Castlereagh experienced at first-hand the effect of military ineptitude and lack of intelligence when the army floundered about the southern Irish countryside in snow and intense cold, as the French invasion fleet approached Bantry Bay.20 These young politicians were soon to be appointed to junior office, when they would discover the long hours required from an undersecretary.
In addition to gaining a formal education at one of the two English universities, ambitious young men went to the Continent in the ten years of peace before 1793 in order to learn French, a clear path to advancement. The 22-year-old Robert Stewart travelled to the Continent in 1791 and went again in 1792, when he confessed to an aunt that ‘I understand French much better than I did, but am rather a greater coward ab[ou]t speaking it than ever.’21 In addition to his Oxford studies, Robert Banks Jenkinson travelled in France and witnessed the fall of the Bastille, as did the irascible William Huskisson, who had his facility with French to thank for his first governmental post as superintendent of the Alien Office in January 1793.* Huskisson’s fluency compensated for the inability of both Dundas (home secretary) and Nepean (undersecretary at the Home Office) to speak the language.22 His main contribution was to be in tackling the immense financial problems that Britain had to face in the later years of the Napoleonic War. Similar financial talents were possessed by John Charles Herries, barely in his teenage years in the late 1780s, but who went on to study at Leipzig University in the 1790s. His knowledge of languages, combined with his accounting ability, was to be of critical importance when he was made commissary-in-chief in 1811 at the age of thirty-three. Equally important in the last two years of the war was Herries’s close working relationship with Nathan Meyer Rothschild, the City banker who contracted with the government to provide enormous amounts of specie to pay the Allied armies. Rothschild was no more than a teenager in Frankfurt in the 1780s and did not arrive in England until 1799.23
Ambitious sea and military officers also t
ravelled to the Continent. Frederick, duke of York, George III’s second son, on whom the king had settled a military career, went to Hanover in 1780 to study French and German, after which he was accelerated through the upper echelons of the army: he was a lieutenant-general by 1784 and a member of the House of Lords by 1787. When the war broke out the king insisted that the duke of York take command, aged twenty-nine of the first army expedition to Flanders.
At the same time a middle-aged Scottish colonel of Engineers, David Dundas, went to Prussia to observe the annual army manoeuvres in 1785, 1786 and 1787, from which experience, and translating from the Prussian textbooks, he published Principles of Military Movements in 1788. In 1792 he published Rules and Regulations for the Formations, Field-Exercise and Movements, of His Majesty’s Forces, which led to the reform of the manoeuvres of heavy infantry regiments that had been abandoned in the American Revolutionary War; these manuals led to the mildly eccentric Dundas being called ‘Old Pivot’ throughout the army. Though largely forgotten today, no soldier in the two decades of conflict played a greater role in the defeat of Napoleon except for the duke of Wellington himself.
The young Arthur Wellesley, an impecunious Irish aristocrat, spent a lonely time at Eton between 1781 and 1785, but his talents and his knowledge of French developed when he enrolled in the French Royal Academy of Equitation at Angers in January 1786. A good knowledge of French was vital for a soldier: apart from its use in diplomacy, operationally it was essential to intelligence work and the interrogation of prisoners. By the time the war broke out, Wellesley had purchased commissions in six regiments, so that without having seen any action he nonetheless found himself lieutenant-colonel and commanding officer of the 33rd Regiment of Foot.24 In the first year of the war, a rising young army captain, Harry Calvert, ADC to the duke of York in Holland, wrote home with advice to the parents of a young man about to get a commission: ‘give the young hero as much French as he can possibly take, while he is in England. Languages are the sine quânon to an officer who wishes to rise above the common routine of regimental duty; and I have myself felt very severely the misfortune of not understanding German.’25
Captain Horatio Nelson also went to France in 1784 to try to master the language, but fell in love, was rejected and came home without having learnt anything. He met a fellow officer while in France, Captain William Young, who became a talented linguist, and who was to play a distinguished administrative role in the wars, as well as at sea. Nelson chose not to meet another naval captain, Alexander Ball, who was residing in the same town, since Ball was wearing the newly fashionable epaulettes of which Nelson did not approve. Ball, a master of languages, ended his career as governor of Malta.26
As soldiers and naval officers these men were trained in the instant obedience of the quarterdeck or parade ground, and they tended to lack the dissembling arts and generally made poor diplomats. But both services needed able administrators and quite a number rose from the ranks of officers. In 1793 one young frigate captain, Thomas Byam Martin, met a young army officer, James Willoughby Gordon, who saw no chance for advancement and wished instead that he had entered the navy. But, as Byam Martin related, Willoughby Gordon
attained to the highest rank in his profession, by self-acquired information in a great degree, and a constant persevering habit of reading and writing, so that he qualified himself for anything which good fortune might chance to throw in his way; and this occurred at no distant period, for his acquirements introduced him to the Duke of Kent, to whose staff at Halifax he was appointed secretary; and his readiness in the discharge of this duty led to a similar appointment under the Duke of York, and to his permanency, I may almost say, in office at the Horse Guards.
The two men next met in 1815, when Sir Thomas Byam Martin was deputy comptroller of the navy and Sir James Willoughby Gordon was quartermaster-general of the army.27
Apart from the uneasy Peace of Amiens – which lasted from March 1802 until May 1803, separating the war against Revolutionary France from the Napoleonic War – hostilities were maintained for a generation, four times as long as either of the major twentieth-century conflicts. In spite of a series of extraordinary naval victories, Britain made no impression whatsoever on French Continental expansion. It was apparent by 1805 that sea power alone would not beat Napoleon, though crucially it enabled Britain to escape defeat, expand its trade and continue to prosecute the war.28 The long failure to secure victory was accompanied by food shortages, consequent social unrest and major financial crises. At two critical periods, between 1796 and 1798, and between 1807 and 1812, the British political system and the economy almost buckled under the strain. How this was avoided is a major theme of Britain Against Napoleon. Politicians, public servants, naval and army officers – all worked for the steady improvement and growth of Britain’s political, financial, naval and military effectiveness.
This book is about these men and their contemporaries: how they operated and how they contributed to Napoleon’s final defeat. It is neither a military nor a naval history; rather, it attempts to put the successes and failures of the army and navy into context, and explain how the two armed forces were supported. It examines the decisions of politicians, the quality of the intelligence available to them and the speed of their communications. It plots the improvements in the defence of the country by volunteers and militia, and the building of more extensive and effective fortifications. It assesses the country’s industrial capability and the role of City finance, and describes how, towards the end of the wars, enough ships, artillery and provisions were provided to the ever-expanding navy and army as a result of a massively increased output, together with improved technology. At the same time, Britain supported Continental allies by sending them substantial amounts of gunpowder and small arms, as well as enormous financial subsidies. If the men who made these things happen had not worked as hard and as competently as they did, Britain would not have survived the onslaught of Napoleonic France.
Part One
THE EVER-PRESENT THREAT
1
The Arms Race and Intelligence 1783–1793
In the month of March 1790, intelligence was received of an outrageous act of insult to the British flag, and cruel treatment of several Englishmen … The din of war ran through the country like wild-fire … The nation at large seemed animated by an indignant feeling … It was with such feelings that the nation flew to arms after seven years of repose; not, however, the repose of idleness, for the time had been profitably spent in renovating and augmenting the fleet.
– Lieutenant (later Admiral) Thomas Byam Martin on the British reaction to the Spanish capture of British ships and seamen at Nootka Sound in 17901
In June 1783 the last shots of the American Revolutionary War were fired between Britain and France many thousands of miles from American shores at Cuddalore in southern India. The fight for American independence had lasted for over seven years, and Britain had fought the colonists in North America, and against France, Spain and Holland. Peace preliminaries had been agreed on 20 January, and the definitive Treaty of Paris was signed on 3 September 1783.2 But though the guns may have fallen silent, this did not mean that mutual suspicion between Britain and France had lessened, even though for at least the first four years of peace all the combatant nations were licking their wounds after a costly war.3 For the rest of the decade most of the nations of Europe were busily rearming. It was not one but several arms races, in a situation remarkably similar to that in Europe before 1914.4 The central great-powers contest was between Britain and France, with Spain potentially ranged alongside her Bourbon partner. However, Russia under Catherine the Great was flexing its muscles, expanding at the expense of Sweden in the Baltic and of Turkey in the Black Sea. By 1788 war had broken out in both these areas.
The British government’s fear of a surprise French attack on India was constant through the early 1780s, not least because the French were building warships at a great rate. In Paris, however, the comte d
e Vergennes, the French secretary of state, seemingly triumphant after helping the American colonists detach themselves from Britain, felt that another war was inevitable, believing that the British would seek to avenge its loss of power and the American market. In 1784 he informed Louis XVI that the newly won peace was ‘absolutely precarious’.5 Vergennes was particularly worried about the recently built battle fleet with which Britain had ended the American Revolutionary War. When the peace treaty was signed, most of these great ships were ordered to stand in frame on the slips where they had been built, ready for the time when they might again be needed.
The immediate post-war years in Britain were ones of extreme political instability, and a feeling of weakness and recrimination prevailed. Parliament and the country had to swallow the bitter pill of the loss of the war and the colonies. After the fall of Lord North’s government in March 1782, four different administrations were sworn in within twenty-one months. Eventually, out of the political chaos emerged William Pitt, second son of William Pitt, earl of Chatham, who had led the country for much of the Seven Years War. The Younger Pitt had been chancellor of the Exchequer in the earl of Shelburne’s administration up to April 1783, and was able to form a government in December 1783 when support collapsed for the seven-month administration of the duke of Portland, supported by Charles James Fox and his old enemy, Lord North.6 Nobody gave Pitt, still short of his twenty-fourth birthday, much of a chance: but he won the 1784 general election by a landslide, and those in 1790 and 1796, too. His premiership was to last eighteen years.7