Britain Against Napoleon

by Roger Knight

  Another foreign crisis, completely unanticipated, hit Whitehall in January 1790, when news came that the Spanish had seized two merchant ships in Nootka Sound, to the west of what is now Vancouver Island, and had imprisoned and ill-treated the crew, an action Spain justified by claiming the whole of the Pacific as its own. At first Pitt was inclined to ignore the incident, but when the owner of one of the ships, John Meares, returned to London in April there was an outcry. British merchants had been trying to penetrate the Pacific since the late seventeenth century, and the trading community had long harboured a strong resentment of a palpably weakened Spain and its supposed monopoly of the South American and Pacific markets. Pitt believed that access to the Pacific was worth fighting for, and he knew that the British Navy, if well deployed, could not be withstood by the Spaniards. Spain’s stance was based upon what it saw as British aggression; but success against Britain’s superior forces would depend upon its Bourbon ally, France, and the French were now badly divided and very disorganized. After 1786 the French Navy had been increasingly debilitated by a lack of money, which eventually led to strikes by unpaid dock workers at Brest and Toulon in 1789, and unfinished and poorly maintained ships.42 In the same year radical elements in Toulon, aligning themselves with the Jacobins in Paris, seized power in the town. In 1790 the Constituent Assembly rashly adopted a new and harsher penal code for French seamen; the French Atlantic Fleet at Brest mutinied, and unrest spread to the dockyard and town.43

  British ministers felt a decision to challenge the Spanish was a risk worth taking. Parliamentary opinion was behind them. Scouting vessels were immediately sent to watch the French and Spanish naval bases: the 36-gun Melampus was positioned off Brest; the sloops Zebra and Fury off Cádiz and Ferrol; and Hound was sent to watch the Swedish Fleet in the Baltic.44 At the same time, Pitt spoke in the House for the British right to trade in the Pacific, maintaining that the wider principles of access to it were now at stake. At the beginning of May 1790 the cabinet ordered the mobilization of the fleet, to be commanded by Lord Howe, and a press for seamen was authorized. The mobilizations in both countries continued through the middle of 1790. Pitt’s plan was to threaten Spanish ports with a powerful Channel Fleet and, using the sea control that this afforded, transport troops to the West Indies, where they would both defend the British West Indies and, if necessary, attack Spanish settlements. Plans to foment rebellion in the Spanish colonies had been in existence since the 1740s but had never been implemented; but the idea of dissolving the control of Old Spain was revived by the presence in London of Francisco de Miranda, who twenty-five years later was to play a part in the founding of Venezuela, the Latin American republic. Although Pitt had several fruitless meetings with him, the idea of British help for liberating Spanish South American colonies was to recur during the Napoleonic War.45 In May, France managed to order the mobilization of fourteen ships of the line in Brest and Toulon, but, because of the tangled state of French politics, unrest in their dockyards and lack of money, they were of no help to their ally. By contrast, forty British ships of the line were fitted out, and by the end of June twenty-five were at sea.46 To match this, the French National Assembly voted in July to mobilize forty-five ships of the line, but, again, although the order went out from Paris, very little happened.47

  In Spain, however, intelligence reports indicated that the armament was going well. Twenty-six ships of the line had been fitted out, though some assessments emphasized the lack of Spanish seamen. Anthony Merry, in temporary charge of the embassy in Madrid, reported that ‘the quickness observed in arming here is much greater than it was expected the Spaniards could have been capable of.’ Reports also came in of large purchases of salted provisions for the Spanish Fleet from as far away as Leghorn, and the British government had to take steps to prevent such shipments from Cork, which exported very large numbers of casks of salt beef and pork directly to Spain.48

  On 4 July, Howe formally took command of the fleet at Spithead. On 30 July the cabinet, in order to intimidate Spain, ordered him to sail to Torbay, ready to get to sea and then cruise off Ushant. Meanwhile, the Spanish Fleet of twenty-six ships of the line had left Cádiz on 20 July, although it cruised in local waters to exercise the crews for some days. Howe put to sea on 14 August with thirty-one ships of the line and nine frigates. By the time he reached Ushant, the Spanish were off Finisterre.49 Two potentially hostile fleets were cruising close to each other in the Western Approaches.

  In late July the resolve of the Spanish had started to give way, and on 24 July they signed a declaration agreeing to reparations for the incident at Nootka, while leaving open the wider question of the rights of access to the Pacific.50 The Spanish government informed the British that it was taking measures to discipline the Spanish officer who had seized the British ships in Nootka, but their requests for mutual disarming were refused by Pitt. Britain accepted the document without abandoning its claims on the Pacific. The Spanish did not give up, waiting to see if France would act on their behalf. But by the middle of 1790 the French Navy was paralysed and a mobilization against Britain was impossible, a situation well known to the British government.

  Another diplomatic crisis was looming in the north, though it came to nothing. Pitt wished to warn Russia not to impose overwhelming terms on Sweden at the conclusion of the war between the two Baltic powers. In order to bring pressure to bear on Russia, Britain began to mobilize a second fleet. On 1 September 1790, Pitt ordered seventeen ships of the line to assemble under Lord Hood in the Downs, but a week later a despatch arrived in London from Stockholm announcing that a satisfactory Baltic peace had been achieved. The fifteen ships that had gathered in the Downs were ordered to Spithead, which they reached by 25 September, to await Howe’s fleet. By October, the Navy Board and the dockyards had made ready no fewer than forty-three ships, and the Admiralty had ordered the raising of 55,000 men.51As Pitt and many others knew, neither the Spanish nor the French – in fact no other European power – could match either the speed of mobilization or a fleet of this strength.

  On 9 October, with autumn storms increasing in frequency, Howe brought his fleet back to Spithead. He had previously sent a ship to Brest to check that the French were not commissioning their warships: it turned out that only one ship was anchored in the Brest Water outside the dockyard. After a month at sea, the Spanish Fleet returned to Cádiz. While conflict in European waters had been avoided, the British ships were still held in readiness. Preparations for an expedition to the West Indies had already been in hand, and on 6 October Rear-Admiral Samuel Cornish departed for Jamaica with six ships of the line and transports with troops for the garrison there, a significant force.

  Pitt pressed home his advantage. On 13 October the British ambassador in Madrid presented an ultimatum to Spain, with orders to return to London within ten days – effectively a declaration of hostilities – if no reply was received. Under considerable pressure, the Spanish government agreed to almost all the British terms. The right of British traders to settle along the coast between Alaska and California and to fish in the Pacific was now established, long desired by merchants in Britain, although the Spanish resisted the demand that merchants should be allowed to trade directly with Spanish America. The prime minister was informed of the capitulation on 4 November, and on 13 November the fleet was ordered to demobilize.52 Pitt had won a considerable diplomatic victory, made possible by France’s naval weakness and the rapid mobilization of the British Navy. He had gone a long way towards restoring British prestige in Europe, so badly shaken by the American Revolutionary War defeat in 1783.

  The final mobilization of the ten years’ peace, spurred by the Ochakov Crisis of 1791, was, by contrast, far from glorious for Pitt. The relatively easy successes in 1787 and 1790 had made him overconfident. The immediate cause of this complex dispute lay in Russian expansion to the south at the expense of Turkey. Both Austria and Prussia were concerned at Russian aggrandizement after its success against Sweden. Britai
n was also having difficulties in completing a commercial treaty with Russia: Catherine the Great’s government was delaying agreement because of its suspicions of British diplomatic and naval intentions, particularly because of the alliance with Prussia that had come about during the Dutch Crisis of 1787.53

  But Russia held all the cards in this dispute. As a self-sufficient Continental country it was not susceptible to British naval power, and the Russian Baltic Fleet would hardly come out of harbour to fight a superior British force. By contrast, Britain was dependent upon supplies of hardwoods, mast timber and hemp from the Baltic region in general, and from Russia in particular.54 Such dependence upon Russia for naval stores, particularly mast timber and hemp, was increasing, and by the 1790s it was almost total.* A major factor in this complicated confrontation was thus the long-term British concern about the supply of vital war materials, one that had dominated the wartime strategy of British governments when dealing with the wider Baltic regions for most of the eighteenth century.55 During the American Revolutionary War, the British Navy had been ruthless in capturing neutral shipping carrying these stores from the Baltic to its Continental enemies.* This British aggression had led to the ‘Armed Neutrality’ in 1780, when Russia, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands formed an alliance to protect their shipping; they stopped just short of hostilities, though the Dutch were forced into war against Britain, to their great cost.

  Although in the two years following the end of the American Revolutionary War, Britain and France quickly replenished their dockyards, both nations were in search of new sources of supply. After 1783 the French developed alternative sources of timber from Cherson on the north shore of the Black Sea;56 and they also came to an agreement with Sweden to secure timber from forests near Gothenburg for the use of the French Navy, an arrangement that resulted in the sale of the French West Indies island of St Barthélemy to the Swedes in 1784.57

  Britain’s search for other sources of naval stores was linked to wider considerations of the balance of power in Europe. Britain wanted a stronger Poland to counter Russian influence in Eastern Europe. One British diplomat stressed its importance to the foreign secretary in 1791: ‘almost the whole commerce of the southern part of Poland, several articles of which, such as hemp, pitch, timber, etc., are of infinite consequence to a maritime power.’58 Poland’s borders at this time stretched far south to the western Ukraine, only a hundred miles from the mouth of the River Dniester on the Black Sea, and its trade depended on this and other rivers. Russia, however, had in 1788 captured from the Turks the fortress city of Ochakov, which dominated this area of the Black Sea coast.

  Though encouraged by the Prussians and by Joseph Ewart, the envoy in Berlin, to take a more aggressive attitude to Russia, Pitt moved cautiously.59 British diplomats tried to bring about an alliance with Turkey and Poland.60 Again, a fleet was mobilized, and again Lord Hood was appointed to command. By the end of March 1791 thirty-three ships of the line were gathered under him in the Downs.61 In late March the cabinet formed a plan to send fleets both to the Baltic and to the Black Sea to support the Turks, where Ochakov was to be attacked. But, beyond providing a naval presence in the Black Sea to put pressure on Russia, there was no clear objective.

  At the end of March 1791 the matter had to be taken to the House of Commons so that money could be granted for further naval armament. The Opposition attacked the proposition thoroughly in both houses, arguing that the government had not justified the measures it was proposing. Although the ministry won the debate in the Commons, the government was shaken, and divisions appeared in the cabinet. Press attacks followed.62 The Levant Company merchants, knowing the local conditions and the weather patterns, were against the plan of mobilization.63 The argument dragged on through April and May, until the government finally backed down. By August a treaty between Russia and Turkey had been signed. Turkey remained vulnerable, and in the next four years Poland was to be partitioned twice.

  Pitt had acted upon diplomatic advice alone; no one with naval experience had been available to him. Howe had gone three years before; Middleton had resigned the previous year; Hood was afloat. Instead, Pitt was advised by his brother, Lord Chatham, first lord of the Admiralty. A glimpse of the poor quality of Chatham’s advice is afforded in the lame and contradictory letter about the Black Sea expedition that he wrote to Joseph Ewart at the end of May 1791, when the government had given up the idea of mobilization.

  The undertaking would be rather an arduous one, the navigation being so little known, and the prevalence of particular winds in the summer months, rendering the passage up the canal of Constantinople very precarious … I should see no objection as a military operation to this step … but … this plan has not been approved here from the consideration that the sailing of a squadron for the Black Sea would be considered, as tending to immediate hostility … and the old objection besides of expense recurs …64

  This failure of foreign policy was quickly forgotten and overtaken by events in France during 1792. Pitt was still in a strong position. The British Channel Fleet was in a more or less continuous state of mobilization from 1790 to 1792; the French Fleet could not put to sea. The naval race had been lost by the French even before the worst excesses of the revolution took effect.65

  By February 1792 Pitt felt he could reduce the Navy Estimates, the first time that he had done so since coming to office in 1783; yet even after some ships had been paid off, the navy remained in a state of readiness: 125 ships were still in commission between July and December 1792, manned by about 20,000 seamen.66 Then, in April, war began on the Continent when France was invaded by Austria and Prussia. In September 1792 the French Revolutionary Army repulsed the Prussian Army at Valmy, and in November the Austrians at Jemappes, after which it occupied the Low Countries. The guillotining of Louis XVI on 21 January 1793 finally convinced Pitt that war between Britain and France was inevitable. Since British naval preparedness was far in advance of that of the French, the sooner it began the better, and on 1 February 1793 the prime minister manoeuvred the French into declaring war.67

  When warned by Edmund Burke at a dinner party at Downing Street in September 1791 of the dangers to the old European order presented by the French Revolution, Pitt had replied, ‘Never fear, Mr Burke: depend on it, we shall go on as we are until the Day of Judgement.’* The prime minister’s ringing confidence was founded upon many years of work, and much expenditure of money, in putting Britain’s navy on a strong footing.

  2

  Pitt’s Investment 1783–1793

  Naval strength is not the growth of a day, nor is it possible to retain it, when once acquired, without the utmost difficulty, and the most unwearied attention. The English have proved by their conduct, for almost two centuries, the firmness and steadiness of their naval character. Whereas the maritime enthusiasm of the French has only occasionally taken place, and does not seem consistent with the bent and genius of the people.

  – Sir John Sinclair, Thoughts on the Naval Strength of the British Empire (1782)

  Pitt took over leadership of the country at a time of extreme political instability but also of rapidly growing economic strength. The population of Great Britain and Ireland increased from thirteen million in 1781 to fourteen and a half million in 1791, and to just under sixteen million by 1801.1 Between 1783 and 1802 the British economy grew at an annual rate of very nearly 6 per cent, a greater pace than at any time during the previous century. Though the period of peace between the wars was a prosperous one for all Europe, other countries lagged well behind Britain’s industrial and commercial development. The critical task for British politicians and administrators at this time was to translate this buoyant economy and newly created wealth into an efficient military machine, particularly the capital-intensive navy. What Pitt’s government managed to achieve before war broke out in 1793 is the key to understanding how Britain survived to come through to eventual victory in 1815.

  Since a large proportion of government i
ncome derived from customs duties, the health of overseas trade was prominent in the minds of government ministers, especially in relation to defence spending. Here Britain enjoyed the advantage of the largest merchant fleet in Europe, owning in 1786 over a quarter of the tonnage at 881,963 tons; the French came second, at just over a fifth, with 729,340 tons.2 In 1780 about five or six million pounds of raw cotton were imported, mostly from the West Indies; during the following twenty years this figure multiplied more than eightfold, to over fifty million pounds. Exports of cotton goods were booming, and were to continue to increase after the start of the war in 1793: average earnings in the 1780s were £750,000; by the turn of the new century that figure was over £5 million, with growth continuing at the remarkable annual rate of 12.3 per cent until 1814.3 Woollens earned the country £3.5 million a year. Fourteen million tons of iron and steel were exported; by the early years of the next century this had doubled.4 Consistently the most important area of trade was northern Europe: the Netherlands, the German ports and the Baltic – with the last of particular significance, as it was the source of crucial strategic raw materials, such as timber, hemp and iron, as well as growing quantities of wheat. Exports to the area were increasing steadily through the 1780s and 1790s and were eclipsing every other trading region in the world.5