Britain Against Napoleon

by Roger Knight

  Exports of textiles and manufactured goods to North America and the West Indies, in return for cotton and sugar, was another pillar of this expansion, though the trade conducted by the East India Company ships was also important (they took the same cargoes, as well as munitions and ordnance for the Company’s armies, and brought back silk and other luxury goods, tea, specie and, vitally, saltpetre from India for the manufacture of gunpowder). The West Indies produced sugar and other tropical products, consumed domestically; but the French held the lead in the West Indies sugar trade and profited from the re-export of sugar to the rest of Europe. Production in St Dominique (now Haiti) exceeded that of Jamaica and the other British islands, and in the 1780s made the merchants of Bordeaux, Nantes, La Rochelle and Marseilles very rich. At the end of the 1780s the sugar exports of St Dominique were more valuable than the total exports of the newly formed United States, but by then the French economy was so dependent upon the West Indies trade in sugar and coffee that when a slave revolt broke out in St Dominique in 1791, it was a major financial blow to France.6 Nor had the victory of French and American arms in the American Revolutionary War translated into an increase in other trade between the allies across the North Atlantic, for the higher quality and lower cost of Britain’s manufactures comprehensively, and remarkably quickly, re-established it in the export trade to its former colonies. For the four years between 1786 and 1789, trade between Britain and the United States was worth £2,567,000, whereas that between France and its former ally was worth only £56,000.7 The French also failed to capitalize on the potential for the procurement of naval stores from the United States, for French naval shipwrights resisted pressure from their ministers to use North American live oak.8

  Britain had the great advantage of being able to draw on the strength and innovations of private industry which benefited from government departments awarding contracts to industrialists and businessmen. By the 1790s, the state victualling and ordnance yards and dockyards alone had nowhere near enough capacity to achieve the increased levels of industrial production needed for prolonged war. Longer lines of responsibility threaded their way from the Whitehall offices, through officials in the state yards and out into the private sector. Much of the business in government offices involved drawing up contracts and overseeing the tendering process, while maintaining quality control over manufactured goods or primary foodstuffs delivered by contractors into the state yards. It took time to decide, when prices were fluctuating, whether to vary the terms of contracts, usually upwards, with merchants who were trading or with industrialists who were manufacturing goods. The government obtained advantages from its dealings with contractors: it needed the market expertise and flexibility provided by merchants and agents, and it profited from the innovations of private manufacturers, who were, in general, more creative than their counterparts in the state establishments.

  Every sort of commodity and service was obtained for the state through contracts, which enabled Britain to accelerate production of shipbuilding, armaments, munitions, civil engineering, fortifications, army supplies and foodstuffs. With ships built of oak with a limited life, the navy’s warship construction had to be continual to keep up the fleet numbers; and, in order to achieve this, it was necessary to engage the building slips and shipwrights of private shipbuilders. Once the war had started, the royal dockyards did not have the capacity to produce enough new ships, other than those of 90- and 100-guns, and had to concentrate upon refitting and repairing an ever-growing fleet (although far more ships were built by the royal dockyards after 1803 than in the French Revolutionary War). The Ordnance depended entirely upon contractors for its small arms and cannon. Army barracks had to be built and maintained, while uniforms, horses, forage and all sorts of supplies had to be procured. The Victualling Board needed fresh provisions, cattle, flour and biscuit and many other foodstuffs: between 1793 and 1815 the Board signed an estimated 10,000 contracts for every sort of provision, with over 1,000 contractors, from merchants to farmers, often men of no great wealth.9

  An example of how closely the state and individuals worked together is provided by John Trotter, a contractor who had started in the American Revolutionary War by supplying the army with bedding.10 At the end of the war in 1783 he persuaded the army, which was as usual looking for immediate economies, not to auction surplus equipment; he then purchased and warehoused every sort of item, which he was able to deliver back to government immediately when war broke out. By taking risks of this kind, his business flourished over the years, not least because of the bureaucratic rivalries between the War Office and the Office of Ordnance.* By 1807 Trotter was controlling 107 depots, and in the following year, most unusually, he was formally brought into government as storekeeper-general.11

  By contrast, another businessman of the period, the shadowy Jean-Jacques de Beaune, took risks with government business on both sides of the Channel. In London, from the mid 1780s to 1791, he negotiated a series of loans to meet the prince of Wales’s debts, secured on the prince’s hereditary revenue. He then moved to Paris, where in 1792 he became the sole contractor to the French Army, supplying horses, drivers and equipment. In the hysterical atmosphere of Paris under threat, he was accused of making excessive profits, arrested and guillotined in 1793.12 After this the French turned away from putting out army supply contracts and opted instead for state control.

  The tax revenues of the burgeoning British economy began to swell. Pitt steered measures through parliament that increased duties on luxury goods but cut those on tea so dramatically that smuggling it became unprofitable. He revived Walpole’s idea of a ‘sinking fund’ of surplus revenue that would go towards redeeming the national debt, which had grown by 1783 to £243 million, held in government loan stock. Thus, every year from 1786 Pitt allotted £1 million to the sinking fund, with £1.2 million added from 1792. The fund was administered by independent commissioners, and legislation was put in place to protect it from raids by the Treasury.13

  The prime minister also brought efficiency measures to both government and private business by simplifying taxes. He moved the collection of some taxes from the overworked Stamps and Excise Office to the Taxes Board. In an impressive exercise in simplification, the tangled and extensive customs duties were codified in the Consolidation Act of 1787, with widespread political approval. In achieving these improvements, Pitt had the assistance of officials such as William Lowndes, whose grasp of fiscal complexities helped him push complicated legislation through the Commons. As a result of this, and of the expanding economy, excise revenue increased by 50 per cent between 1782 and 1796, while the costs of collection fell.14

  The machinery of government also needed reform, as demonstrated by the findings of two parliamentary enquiries. In 1780 Lord North had been forced to appoint a Committee on Public Accounts, which reported on the activities of government departments up to 1787. It found widespread sinecures held by officials and that some departments were totally inefficient. It proposed a radically new philosophy for government administration: that those holding government posts were there to serve the members of the public and should not exploit them for personal profit. Pitt agreed with the reforming principles of the commissioners appointed to the Committee on Public Accounts, as described in their Seventh Report of 1782: officeholders must ‘be made into servants of the state and, through the state, of the public’; and a person in office ‘ought not to be permitted … to carve out for himself an interest in the Execution of a public Trust’. But Pitt made sure such principles were never debated in the House.15

  Pitt appointed the Commission on Fees, which completed its First Report in 1786, examined in detail the system of payment of government officials, and found an illogical and inefficient bureaucracy, staffed by officials on small salaries, whose incomes were swollen by the payment of ‘Fees, Gratuities, Perquisites and Emoluments’ paid by contractors, army and naval officers, and other interested members of the public. It, too, recommended far-reaching chang
es in the salary structure.* Though these ideas took root only slowly, they established themselves after 1800 as ground rules of the first importance for government administration.

  Pitt’s reputation as an honest man was unassailable, but the perceived greed of his followers gave the Opposition a stick with which to beat his government. Thus, long-term suspicions were held about the power of Henry Dundas, who controlled thirty-six parliamentary seats in Scotland and held the post of president of the India Board of Control from 1793 to 1801, in addition to his role as home secretary from 1791 to 1794 and then secretary of state for war from 1794 to 1801.16 Pitt disappointed many of his followers when he did not act on the recommendations of the Committee on Public Accounts, which reported between 1780 and 1787, and the reports of the Commission on Fees, Gratuities, Perquisites and Emoluments in the Public Offices, made between 1786 and 1788.† Rather than publicly agree with these principles, Pitt simply abolished unnecessary sinecure posts under his control, especially in the Customs Department, when they became vacant through the death of the incumbent.* These redundant posts slowly diminished in number, and the great reforming promise of Pitt’s early years as prime minister inched forward only slowly.17 Another result of Pitt’s postponement of reform, which became the big political issue after his death, was the continuing weaknesses in auditing and accounting across government spending departments. The commissions of Naval Revision and of Military Enquiry had to tackle this problem urgently when it became critical for the financial health of the country. ‘Honest Billy’s’ combination of intellect, political intelligence and unworldliness was timely and priceless, but he left it to others to achieve real reform. ‘The image of his dedication to probity and efficiency, rather than his actual accomplishments, was in fact Pitt’s greatest contribution to the eventual modernization of British government administration.’18

  A further priority was to bring about long-term improvements in Britain’s military strength to prepare for any future conflict, a demonstrable need after the failures of the American Revolutionary War. Both the navy and the Ordnance required capital investment, and the prime minister invested handsomely, spending a total of £64,549,000 in the nine years between 1784 and 1792.† Naval expenditure was not slashed, as was usual after an eighteenth-century war, and increased from just under £7 million in 1783 to £9,447,000 in 1784 and £11,851,000 in 1785; this enabled Pitt to cut the navy debt that had accumulated since the American Revolutionary War, clearing all navy bills up to June 1783.19‡ The finance that Pitt made available had an immediate impact. The number of dockyard workers was retained at wartime levels, avoiding the usual post-war wholesale discharge of a large proportion of the labour force. The workers were used immediately to dock and repair the existing fleet. Here Britain had a considerable advantage over its Continental rivals. At the end of the American Revolutionary War in 1783, a remarkable total of thirty-seven ships of the line were either building or on the stocks waiting to be launched, most of them by private shipbuilders under Navy Board contract.* Between 1778 and 1783 Britain built 164 warships measuring 126,812 tons, three quarters of which were built in merchant yards (132 ships totalling 94,806 tons). At the height of the war, between 1780 and 1783, merchant yards built no fewer than nineteen 74-gun ships, to add to the nine built by the royal dockyards. This was the first time that private shipbuilders had decisively showed their collective industrial capacity, a development that was to be of even more importance in the following decades.20 This new capacity enabled the royal dockyards to concentrate on building the 90- and 100-gun ships, which were too large for merchant yards, since they had to be built in a dock and floated out, rather than launched from a slip. By 1793 three first-rate ships had been built and two were on the stocks; six second-rate ships had been completed and five were under construction. A carefully planned maintenance programme was also put in hand, with a target of ten major repairs a year (although this was exceeded). During the ten years of peace, 138 ships of the line were built or given major repairs. By the early 1790s the fleet was in good order, which enormously relieved the pressure on the dockyards in the early years of the French Revolutionary War.

  The royal dockyards, however, needed to be overhauled. Well before peace was signed in March 1783, Middleton, the comptroller of the navy, was in action and tightening control. The dockyards had been governed by a system of standing orders since 1660, but by this point so many had been issued that they were overcomplicated and often contradictory. Middleton simplified and clarified them, and during 1783 the Navy Board issued 255 revised standing orders to the dockyards, and in the following year 96.21 These changes were accompanied by threats and sanctions to be applied in the event of shortcomings. Dockyard clerks were ‘not to be promoted by rote but by ability’. Some at Plymouth were dismissed for embezzling coal, and in June 1783 the standing order that discharged them was ordered to be read out to clerks in all the yards, quarterdeck fashion: ‘if there was trouble, clerks will be discharged without further ceremony.’ Apprentices (and therefore the apprentices’ wages) were taken away from more senior shipwrights in supervisory roles, and were awarded to working shipwrights, enabling the apprentices to be taught their trade properly. Information on workmen dismissed for embezzlement or similar misdemeanours was to be centralized in the Navy Office, and then re-circulated to other yards, so that a mechanism was in place that would stop offenders from entering another yard.22

  Nobody could drive this amount of change through conservative institutions without attracting a great deal of unpopularity, and Middleton, knowing that he had the prime minister’s support, made no attempt to avoid it. He was a complex mix of self-belief, ruthless ambition and evangelical righteousness, and he trusted no one to do a job as well as he could himself. These qualities were reinforced by an unusual degree of irritability, for he had gained a reputation for an ungovernable temper when serving at sea, which on at least two occasions involved violence upon crew members under his command.23 He lacked standing with the sea officers because he had failed to distinguish himself before his long service ashore as an administrator.24 Admiral Sir John Jervis complained tetchily of Middleton’s ‘cant, Imposture, loads of precedents, and scraps of stay Tape & Buckram’ and ‘the utmost extent of his abilities having gone no further than the forming of a swaddling system of morality for his ship’s company’.25

  He was no more popular with civilian administrators. The normally tolerant and mild George Marsh, clerk of the acts,* who had worked in the Navy Office since 1745, devoted very long passages of his diary to his frustrations with Middleton. Relations had been friendly for Middleton’s first four years in office, but Marsh became disillusioned, as he noted in his journal on 30 May 1789, for Middleton ‘made all the knowledge he got from others his own so that he was deemed by people in power the best and most able Commissioner of the Navy Board’; ‘By his manner he appeared to be a religious, just man, but by his actions he proved himself the contrary … he was in general a deceitful, proud, despicable character. I must own his ungrateful and unchristian like conduct to me has occasioned me rather more uneasiness of mind, than I ever had before from any connections with public office.’26†

  However, real progress was bedevilled by the poor working relationship between the Admiralty and Navy offices. A board of seven commissioners oversaw the Admiralty, headed by the first lord, and it was senior to the Navy Board that built and maintained the ships. Other subordinate boards included the Transport and the Sick and Hurt boards, while the Victualling Board provided food for the seamen, although in August 1793 it was made responsible for feeding not only the navy but also the army garrisons overseas.27 Howe, the first lord of the Admiralty, and Middleton, the comptroller of the navy, at the head of the Navy Board, had always been at odds. The Navy Board had been established at least 200 years before the Admiralty and had long guarded jealously its status and expertise. For twelve years, from his appointment in 1778 until his resignation in 1790, Middleton dominated the Na
vy Board. Now a bitter struggle ensued between the occupants of these two powerful posts. Howe was even more complex than Middleton, regarding the junior officer as an upstart, and was devoid of the political arts, cautious and unpopular with his fellow naval officers, and pilloried in the press. But the main bar to success was his inability to express himself.* After a wary start on his appointment in 1783, the first lord soon offended Middleton. The comptroller had always been consulted on senior appointments, but Howe soon appointed an assistant surveyor without reference to Middleton. The first lord then made a surprise dockyard inspection in September 1784, countermanded Middleton’s orders and made criticisms that he sent on to Pitt. Completed warships that the comptroller had carefully kept on their slips, covered by a timber roof, so that their condition would not deteriorate, were ordered to be launched immediately.28 This was a direct invasion of Middleton’s territory and relations worsened.

  In spite of these damaging bureaucratic battles, Middleton continued with the reform of the working conditions and payment of shipwrights, caulkers, smiths and many other trades in the dockyards. Schemes of task and job work, intended to provide incentives, rather than payment by the day, which had started in the 1770s, were firmly established throughout the six yards (though Plymouth resisted until 1788).29 The comptroller also attempted to stop the age-old abuse of ‘chips’, pieces of wood discarded after work had been completed on the main timbers of a ship, which by custom the members of the workforce were allowed to take out of the yard. As the order pointed out, workmen spent time making up bundles and wasted a great deal of material, and it encouraged pilfering of other materials such as iron nails or pieces of copper. Only shipwrights and house carpenters, ‘and to such of them only employed on axe work’, were now allowed to carry waste timber out of the yard. Further, the yard officers were ordered