by Roger Knight
The years of peace between every eighteenth-century war had always been devoted to rearming. After the Seven Years War, from 1763 to 1775, both the British and the French attempted to balance their severely dented post-war finances against the need for a warship-rebuilding programme. Both were disappointed with their respective efforts, though by spending lavishly the French managed to cut the British advantage in number of ships.8 The fatal hesitancy of Lord North’s government to mobilize enough warships in the early years of the American Revolutionary War left Britain in the weakest naval position it was ever to experience relative to the Bourbon powers of France and Spain, which, exceptionally, acted together in support of the colonists.9 In spite of the strong showing of the navy during the last two years of the war, Britain’s position would once again be weak if it had to fight a united France and Spain. Lord Howe in a letter in early 1786 drew the king’s attention to, ‘the extraordinary attention given by the other Maritime Powers of Europe to the increase of their naval strength, and the nature of their alliances’.10 Pitt reduced the navy debt, which had stood at over £15 million in 1783, to £1.5 million in 1786, chiefly by converting the principal debt into stocks that were sold on the London market. He secured parliamentary approval for high levels of Naval Estimates and expenditure, at between £2 million and £3 million a year for most of the decade, because of the general rearming in Europe.11
Through the 1780s the combined battle-fleet tonnage of the two Bourbon powers exceeded that of Britain’s by 35 per cent, a margin greater than that during the fatal early years of the American Revolutionary War, when Lord North’s government had failed to rearm and mobilize in time.12 Money was needed to improve the infrastructure and equipment of its armed forces, and the capital-intensive navy required the greater share, for the building of new ships and maintaining the condition of the existing fleet were critical. The building of a ship of the line was only the beginning. What counted were well-manned ships at sea, their holds full of provisions, gunpowder and shot. For the first time in the eighteenth century, the navy had a carefully calculated plan of maintenance.* It aimed for, and achieved, a hundred ships of the line, ready and effective at all times, their frames maintained to keep pace with the natural deterioration of oak-built ships, which meant giving thorough repairs to at least ten ships of the line and ten frigates every year, a rate of peacetime maintenance never attempted before. This would have been the main subject under discussion when Pitt made his regular visits to Somerset House to see the comptroller of the navy.13
Three departments of state – the Foreign Office, the Home Office and the Admiralty – monitored the war preparations of the French and other potential enemies.* Each ran its own intelligence network, and, as we shall see, intelligence-sharing between the departments could be sporadic and patchy. Information available to Foreign Office ministers was complemented by regular reports from diplomats in foreign capitals. Evidence of the activities of the spies and agents is not easy to come by, but some of the Treasury accounts recording payments to them still exist. Annual expenditure on intelligence by the Foreign Office was around £25,000 up to 1786, but, with the first of the diplomatic crises, over the Dutch in 1787, spending increased dramatically to £98,050; and in 1788 to £211,796.14 The undersecretary at the Home Office, Evan Nepean, also ran a network of spies. The accounts reveal that between 1785 and 1789 he paid £14,576 to his agents, but there is no way of knowing the total amount expended by all departments.15
The third department that spent money on intelligence was the Admiralty. Most of its information on the French Navy came from observations by British warships off the main naval bases of Brest and Toulon. For the Atlantic coast the main source of intelligence came from Captain Philippe D’Auvergne, who commanded a squadron of small ships based in Jersey from the 1780s until almost the end of the Napoleonic War, and whose knowledge of the treacherous coast and fast-flowing tides off the Normandy and Brittany coasts was second to none.* However, the Home Office, too, had Brest watched. Nepean’s accounts, for instance, record a payment of £105 on 3 May 1785 to a James Johnstone, ‘to defray the expenses of his Journey to Brest and other places on the coast of France’; on 24 May a Captain Le Geyt was paid £25.5s. ‘for information on the proceedings of the French on the coast of Normandy’.16
Toulon, the principal base of the French Mediterranean Fleet, also had to be watched, and alarming rumours started early in the peace. The European-wide spy network, controlled from Rotterdam by a Dutch woman, Margrete Wolters, had been operational since the Seven Years War. She had agents not only in Paris but in all French and Spanish naval ports. She reported her intelligence to the Admiralty, but she had retired.† It reported in October 1784 that Toulon was expected to have thirty battleships ready by the next January.17 Nepean immediately sent a naval officer, Captain Arthur Phillip – who was to command the ‘First Fleet’, which founded the British colony in New South Wales at the end of the decade – to investigate. Phillip reported that ten battleships were in the port, though they were not preparing for sea. Several frigates could be ‘ready for Sea in a short time’ and that the arsenal was ‘in very good Order and very superior to what it was when I saw it before the War’.18 He was paid £150 for his trouble.19
Gibraltar, which during the American Revolutionary War had been under siege by the Spaniards for nearly four long years, was another cause for concern. British access and trade to the Mediterranean depended upon it. The prime minister took a personal interest in the design and building of small, sailing gunboats for the defence of the Rock. Captain Roger Curtis, who had been present at Gibraltar during the siege, was sent on a secret mission to the Baltic at Treasury expense to obtain the best gunboat design from the Swedes, whose coasts were lined with inlets and small islands suitable for these small shallow-draught vessels, armed with a single large gun. He had discussions with the great naval architect Fredrik af Chapman, son of a British naval officer in the Swedish Navy, and admiral superintendent at Karlskrona Dockyard, then at the height of his prestige. Curtis brought back gunboat plans and in November 1787 these were laid before Pitt, several gunboats were built at Deptford Dockyard, and trials took place during the next year.20 The defence of Gibraltar was never to be a problem in the coming wars.
A far bigger naval threat was posed by the French attempt at Cherbourg to build breakwaters to establish a safe anchorage for their fleet in the Channel. Had it succeeded, the danger to Britain in the Western Approaches would have been increased radically. The geography of the south coast of England had given the British the advantage in the Channel, because the naval bases at Portsmouth and Plymouth were accessible in most winds, approached by the Solent and Plymouth Sound, even though they were tricky to leave in strong south-westerlies. In addition, Torbay was a safe fleet anchorage, except in strong east and south-easterly winds. The French Fleet, on the other hand, could rendezvous only at Brest, facing west into the Atlantic, and thus could not leave in the prevailing westerly or south-westerly wind. The new harbour at Cherbourg would have been north-facing, enabling warships to use a south-westerly wind for a sudden descent on the British coast, while the same wind would have made it difficult for the British Fleet to get out of harbour.
However, French engineers faced what were to prove insuperable difficulties. Before the advent of steam power, which enabled the moving of rocks of greater size and the fixing of thicker and stronger piers, building a new harbour with only wind- and manpower was a difficult, often impossible, undertaking. The wooden cones with rocks inside them that provided the foundation of the piers needed to be strong enough to withstand fierce Channel tides and northerly winter gales. Work on new breakwaters at Cherbourg began soon after the end of the American Revolutionary War in 1783, and the first large ‘cone’ was sunk in June 1784. Ninety were planned. To emphasize the importance of the project, the site was visited in 1786 by Louis XVI.21
British interest in the project unsurprisingly extended across several government
departments. When the negotiators for a proposed commercial treaty travelled to Paris in 1786, the foreign secretary wrote to the chief negotiator that, although the ‘Government is already in possession of many particulars respecting the nature and progress of the works at Cherbourg, I shall very thankfully receive any additional information.’22 D’Auvergne sent in regular reports to Lord Howe at the Admiralty, as did the young Captain Sidney Smith, who was travelling in France.23 A senior naval captain and MP for Plymouth, John Macbride, also spent a day on the site in August 1787, reporting to Middleton that thirteen cones were in place and that five more were on the stocks. Macbride was impressed with progress, which he attributed to ‘near about ten thousand men at work … between four and five hundred stone lighters are constantly at work.’ One French 64-gun ship had passed the winter there and had found it a good roadstead. The inner basin and outer fortifications had been improved. ‘On the whole,’ Macbride concluded, ‘it is a wonderful undertaking; in my opinion it will answer.’24
Had further progress been made, the outcome would have been serious, but the winter gales of 1788 destroyed the timber work of the westward cones. Howe had always held that it would fail. He wrote to Roger Curtis: ‘I shall have much satisfaction in … disproving the evidence in favour of the undertaking.’25 The French did not give up easily, however, and were still working on the project in December 1789. In late May, Captain Sir Andrew Snape Douglas, commanding the Southampton frigate, anchored by the breakwater. He reported in June 1789 to Lord Hood, commander-in-chief at Portsmouth, that three French regiments, 600 seamen and ‘a considerable body of artificers’ were still at Cherbourg, and he reckoned that the breakwater would be finished to the low-water mark by the end of the year:
With regard to the success of the Digue [breakwater] and its standing to the end of time, I have as little doubt as I had at first I walked upon it, and could easily perceive that the stones were not at all moved or incommoded by the Sea, and it is so clear and well shaped on the inside that a ship of three Decks might lay alongside of it afloat. I have little doubt of Cherbourg becoming a place of refuge for an inferior fleet or a place of rendezvous to prepare an attack upon this Country if the French should ever be in a position to do so.26
With their state finances rapidly weakening, however, the French abandoned the project for many years at the end of 1789.27
In 1787 the nature of the peace changed when Pitt’s government experienced its first diplomatic crisis. Hitherto Pitt had taken little interest in the Continent, concentrating on tax reform and government efficiencies.28 A Dutch political crisis provided Pitt with his first foreign test. Though the Netherlands was a shadow of the power of a hundred years earlier, its strategic position and trade links, particularly in the East Indies, meant that nations would fight to ensure it did not fall under the influence of an unfriendly power. Internal politics consisted mainly of hostilities between the Orangeists, led by the stadtholder, and the Patriot Party, which had republican leanings. The former were supported by Britain and several of the Northern Powers, including Prussia, for the sister of King Frederick William II was married to the stadtholder. Tension escalated when the Princess of Orange was captured and held prisoner by the Patriot Party. The courts of Europe were shocked by the insult to a sovereign power. It was a precursor to the violence soon to erupt in France. Encouraged by Britain, the Prussians began to mobilize their army through the summer of 1787.29 The French started to make preparations for war.
British officials naturally wanted to find out as much as they could about how the French were deploying their forces. In the late summer of 1787 Nepean twice sent an agent over to Dunkirk and Gravelines, and paid for several reports from observers at Brest and Toulon through the summer and autumn. Payments were also made to the master of a merchant ship from Sandwich in Kent for ‘watching the motions of the French’.30 All these reports can only have demonstrated how little the French were mobilizing their navy. But on 9 September intelligence was received in the Admiralty that French troops were preparing to embark in Dunkirk, Calais and Boulogne and to sail for the coast of Holland.* By now the Prussian Army was on the borders of the Republic of the United Provinces, waiting to move, and it invaded on the expiration of its ultimatum on 13 September.
Only then did Pitt decide to act. On 19 September 1787 the government ordered twenty-seven ships of the line into commission.31 In determining what steps to take next, Pitt did not restrict himself to advice from cabinet. On 1 October 1787 he called a typically informal meeting at Downing Street, writing a note to Admiral Lord Hood, his cousin and at that time commander-in-chief at Portsmouth: ‘If you should have no particular engagement I should be much obliged to you if you could dine here today. Our Party is formed for the purpose of talking over operations abroad, in case they should soon become necessary.’32 At the Admiralty Office in Whitehall, on 9 October, Pitt, Howe, the master-general of the Ordnance, the duke of Richmond and the lord chancellor, Lord Thurlow, agreed that Howe should issue orders to commanders of warships in the Channel to intercept French ships, ‘and if he finds them steering towards that coast to do his utmost to take or destroy them’.33
Pitt was able to take a tough line with confidence, knowing how weak the French were financially.* Faced with a Prussian army already in Holland and with the British naval mobilization, on 27 October France backed down and signed a declaration stating that it would cease interfering with internal Dutch politics. Both Britain and France agreed to place their navies on a peace establishment at the level of 1 January 1787.34 For France, this was a humiliating loss of face, and Vergennes’s plans to build up French power and prestige were thwarted. When the crisis was over, Charles James Fox, Pitt’s great parliamentary opponent, and who at this time was no friend to France, declared in the Commons that Britain should improve its ‘marine, cherish and preserve it and all that belonged to that favourite service, and we might then consider the ambition of the House of Bourbon, its imbecility, or its power, as matters of equally trifling consideration’.35
The government ordered the British Fleet to be demobilized at the end of 1787, but, as usual through the periods of peace in the eighteenth century, Britain kept a considerable number of ships at sea, unlike any other European country. By mid 1788, 111 ships were in commission, manned by 18,243 seamen, with half a dozen ships of the line, acting as guard ships, at Portsmouth and at Plymouth, and a smaller number performing a similar duty at the mouth of the Thames. Smaller vessels cruised at Jamaica, the Leewards, Nova Scotia, the Mediterranean and Newfoundland, protecting British trade.36 The ‘First Fleet’ voyaged to New South Wales. Despite inevitable wear and tear on the ships at sea, British officers and seamen (unlike the French) kept up their seamanship skills and ensured a steady flow of intelligence. For instance, in July 1788 Captain Henry Warre, commanding the sloop Kingfisher in Toulon, sent a detailed report to Philip Stephens, the secretary of the Admiralty, on the state of the French ships there. His visit included the usual elaborate courtesies between officers and gentlemen of the ancien régime. ‘The Compte D’Albert, the “commandant marines”,’ he reported, ‘was exceedingly obliging, and seemed to regret His Majesty’s ships did not often visit Toulon, and expressed himself sorry his Orders were positive to prevent all Englishmen whatever from viewing the dockyard. Any other foreigners are permitted to see it.’37 Warre, however, furnished Stephens with a detailed list of the French ships, including whether or not they were copper or iron bolted, and estimated completion dates for those being built, implying that the commandant had given him the information.
As revolutionary events unfolded across the Channel, Nepean’s internal domestic surveillance began to feature in the Home Office secret service accounts. An entry appears in February 1788 for four guineas to be paid, as a counter-espionage measure, to ‘Capt. Collett who is employed by the French Minister in obtaining accounts from time to time of the state of Equipments at Portsmouth and Chatham to induce him to discover such other pers
ons as are employed in the same way’.38 The Russian ambassador in London was watched because he ‘and his attendants … were concerned in enticing seamen into the Russian service’. Irishmen with suspected contacts with France were also followed.39
In late 1788, the government also used its intelligence machine to spy upon Opposition politicians at the time of the Regency crisis, when the king’s illness (porphyria) appeared to be a permanent condition. The prospect of the prince of Wales as regent replacing the monarch seemed very real. Such an occurrence would bring the Prince’s friends in Opposition to power and Pitt needed to know who was talking to the leaders of the Opposition. Accordingly, two men were employed by a Home Office agent, William Clarke, who had been instructed by Nepean to watch those ‘who frequented the houses of the Duke of Portland and Mr Sheridan’. Portland had already briefly been prime minister and within five years would be home secretary in Pitt’s coalition government. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, MP for Stafford, was another prominent Whig, whose oratory was much feared by the government although his overall political contribution was to be slight. The only government post he occupied in a long political career was as treasurer of the navy, appointed by the Whigs when they briefly came to power in 1806.40 He was a witty, hard-drinking and erratic Irishman, perpetually on the brink of bankruptcy, who juggled the careers of dramatist, theatre manager and politician over thirty years, and was known as the ‘King of Drury Lane’. On 6 December 1788, the two men employed by Clarke followed Sheridan all day around London, when he visited, among others, Josiah Wedgwood, the duke of Devonshire, Charles James Fox and Brooks’s, the club at the centre of Whig politics. Sheridan’s followers finally left off the chase at 1.30 in the morning when their quarry was at Mrs Fitzherbert’s, in the company of the prince of Wales, the duke of York and the duke of Queensberry.41 The use of Home Office domestic surveillance was to be put to more justifiable use in the years ahead, when it was directed against those British subjects with extreme radical and violent agendas and French émigrés with doubtful sympathies, and was to become a central feature of the intelligence war.