by Roger Knight
Perhaps the attention of the government was distracted by violence at home, but from the start it underestimated the capacity of the French army to fight, assuming that the country had been fatally weakened by the revolution. Thus inexperience and overconfidence typified the British government’s handling of the first seven years of the war. From the early 1790s Pitt’s closest political confidants were Henry Dundas and Lord Grenville, Pitt’s cousin, and this triumvirate largely controlled British foreign policy and war strategy between 1791 and 1801, ensuring that the cabinet supported decisions that effectively they had already taken. Occasional sharp disagreements occurred, with Dundas much keener to secure the colonies and sea power, and Grenville much more committed to the Continent; but mutual respect kept them together for the first phase of the war.10
Henry Dundas, the object of many of Pitt’s visits to Somerset House in the 1780s and 1790s, was a boisterous and convivial politician, a manager of men and of Scottish parliamentary seats, whose route to power lay in building an unassailable political base in Scotland. One political ally thought he had ‘the best social and public virtues, an affectionate heart as a parent, a husband and friend, and an unparalleled good temper’.11 But his plain speaking, as well as his great power, made him enemies. He was very influential in the East India Company. From 1784 he was a commissioner of the India Board of Control, through which the government liaised with the Company, and from 1793 to 1801 was its president. Perhaps his least recognized achievement was as secretary of state for war in the second half of the 1790s: as the chief creator of a national defence force, he ensured that, by the end of the Revolutionary War, Britain was safer from invasion than ever before, and in possession of an increased military capability. Not for nothing has he been described as Britain’s Lazare Carnot.12 Pitt was closer to Dundas than to Grenville: ‘every act of Dundas’s’, the prime minister wrote in 1794, ‘is as much mine as his.’13 This friendship brought Pitt relaxation, involving on occasion horseplay and copious alcohol, for Dundas had been brought up at the Scottish bar, notorious for its tradition of heavy drinking.14
Lord Grenville was the opposite: unpopular, cold and withdrawn, and he held his principles so securely that they translated into inflexibility.* In 1789 he became home secretary – a role that, until 1801, also had responsibility for the colonies – and then foreign secretary in 1791. George Canning, when meeting Grenville in 1793, thought he had less reserve than he had been led to expect by his reputation, and that it proceeded more ‘from shyness than haughtiness. But he is a man not to be judged-of by once seeing.’15 His hauteur made him enemies: years later, Lord Liverpool, the future prime minister, remarked of Grenville: ‘He has no feelings for anyone … he is in his outward manner offensive to the last degree.’16 Grenville’s strong character and considerable linguistic skills made him formidable in cabinet, especially on foreign policy. Only Pitt could overcome him in debate, and that with difficulty.†
However, these strong personalities were inexperienced; they avoided expert military counsel and logistical advice, and were unwilling to understand the limited capacity of the British military machine, which was to become well oiled only with war experience. Much was wrong with the command structure at the top of the army; as Harry Calvert described it, ‘the system still prevailing of ordering from the Cabinet at St James’s the active operations of the army in the field’.17
The Whig Opposition did not fail to attack the government’s performance in the conduct of the war, but was divided, and Pitt did his best to drive a wedge between the different factions. The moderates were splitting from the followers of Charles James Fox. Of this radical group, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Charles Grey were the most effective parliamentary orators, and they were bitter rivals.‡ Grey’s character was contradictory: he was very ambitious, passionate, at times depressive and introspective, with a powerful need to be in charge that did not make him popular. Lady Holland, one of the greatest of the Whig grandees, described him as ‘a man of violent temper and unbounded ambition’. He was also a man of extremes of mood: one woman friend noted that ‘he is either very happy or very sad.’18 He enjoyed a life of an apparently fulfilled domesticity, having no fewer than eleven sons and four daughters, yet he also kept a string of mistresses well into his sixties, among them Sheridan’s young second wife, Hecca. Grey had made an immediate impact from the time of his first speech in the House in 1788, and both parties hoped that he would join them. His family connections, including those of his father, General Sir Charles Grey, were with Pitt’s administration, but there was distance between father and son, and the younger man’s career as a Whig politician was shaped by personal, rather than political, considerations. As Lady Holland commented, ‘all the beauty and wit of London were on that side, and the seduction of Devonshire House prevailed.’19 The chief attraction was Georgiana, duchess of Devonshire, who became his mistress and bore him a daughter. In this argumentative hothouse, Grey, Sheridan and some of the younger Whigs set up the Association of Friends of the People, which pressed for a radical agenda that included annual elections and greater democracy. Grey later regretted this impetuous, ambitious decision.20 It was the start of a forty-year career, and although much of Grey’s time was spent in Opposition, he was eventually to lead the Whigs as prime minister at their finest moment, the passing of the Great Reform Act of 1832.
Considering the advantages enjoyed by Britain, the war got off to a bad start. Critics of government could not, however, accuse Pitt, Dundas and Grenville of lack of energy. The government embarked on a bold diplomatic strategy when it put together the First Coalition in February 1793: Austria, Prussia, the Netherlands, Spain and Sardinia united against Revolutionary France. This coalition was supported by many British subsidies to Continental powers, the first of which was a payment to Hanover in 1793 of £452,000. Over the next twenty years there were to be over a hundred such financial transfers. They were naturally never popular with the country at large, but they were necessary to keep the nations on the Continent in the field against the French.21
In April 1793, British troops, commanded by the duke of York, were sent to Holland to defend it after the Austrian Netherlands had been overrun by French armies. A ‘Flanders war’ had never been planned and was embarked upon only to keep Austria, defeated at Jemappes, in the war. An improvement in Austrian fortunes at the Battle of Neerwinden in March was not, however, a sign of things to come. Dundas ordered an expedition to besiege the fortress-port of Dunkirk.22 The British Army was still being regrouped after the wide dispositions made during the mobilizations of 1790 and 1791, but the rapid expansion of the army with untrained men limited its effectiveness. This led to damaging friction between Dundas and the duke of Richmond, who had not approved of the expedition to Dunkirk. Pitt was warned by Richmond not to throw away his army.* Recruits needed at least six months of training, and then they would still be raw, unable to face experienced troops.23 Officers were appointed ‘whose years and inexperience totally disqualified them for the situation’, according to one officer in the field.24 This lack of unity was felt even as far as the battlefield; as Calvert complained to a fellow officer:
We want artillerymen, we want a general officer at the head of the artillery, we want drivers and smiths; we want three major-generals of infantry; we want a commanding engineer of rank and experience; we want a total reform in our hospital; we want, at least, two out of the four brigades of mounted artillery with which his Grace of Richmond is amusing himself in England …25
Without sufficient siege weapons (a failure of ordnance supply) York sat for two weeks in front of the walls of Dunkirk waiting for artillery and equipment to reach him. Outnumbered by approaching French armies, his army was defeated at Hondscoten. York suffered 10,000 casualties and lost much of his recently arrived artillery. Much blame was heaped upon the duke: appointed at the age of twenty-nine at the king’s insistence, he was to prove brave but inexperienced. On one occasion, during the retreat in the
winter of 1794/5, he was nearly taken prisoner.*
The calamitous expedition to Dunkirk did not divert the minds of ministers from the main strategy advocated by Henry Dundas of taking the French West Indies islands. The purpose was to weaken the wealth of France by capturing its islands and their sugar plantations. Stripping troops from England, Ireland and Gibraltar would enable Dundas to equip General Grey (father of Charles Grey the young Whig), who commanded the expedition, with over 16,000 troops. A departure date in the last week of September 1793 was set, time enough, Dundas believed, to take the French Windward Islands and St Dominque by the end of the year. At the end of August, Toulon had surrendered to Hood and the British Fleet, and was now defended by a thin force of British troops, with some help from Spanish and Neapolitan allies, both nations committed to stamping out revolutionary ideas. Dundas reckoned that there was enough time to bring 10,000 of the soldiers who had just been despatched to the West Indies back across the Atlantic in the spring of the next year to relieve the forces in Toulon.26 He was encouraged in this impossibly ambitious plan by wildly overenthusiastic and overconfident despatches from Hood at Toulon, and was unwilling to listen to professional advice from soldiers or seamen or civil servants (who so early in the war had little experience of strategic planning or resource calculations). In the event, Hood was forced to abandon Toulon in December 1793, withdrawing to Corsica with thousands of refugees on board his ships, though he did manage to capture and destroy thirty-two French ships of the line and stores before leaving. (The French naval effort in the Revolutionary War, in spite of the compensation of sixteen newly built ships, never recovered.27)
In May 1794, following reverses, the Austrians decided to abandon their long-held possessions in the Netherlands. Dundas, worried about the invasion threat that might develop if the French occupied Ostend, ordered Major General Lord Moira to Ostend with command of a force of 10,000 men to defend the port at all costs. Bizarrely, he despatched Moira without any reference to the other commander in the field, the duke of York.28 Soon after his expedition landed, it was re-embarked to aid the unrest in Brittany. By July, British forces were evacuated from the Low Countries. The expedition was witnessed by a disillusioned 25-year-old lieutenant-colonel, Arthur Wellesley: its mismanagement led him to attempt, unsuccessfully, to leave the army and find a civil post in government.29
Dundas persevered with the West Indies expeditions, which continued with enormous loss of life through disease until 1797, while Pitt and Grenville were forced to fall back on the long, slow process of coalition building with Continental powers. Howe’s capture on 1 June of seven ships of the line in his battle with the French Channel Fleet, which was escorting a huge convoy of grain from America to Brest, was greeted with relief and rejoicing.* But anti-war sentiment was growing. By the end of 1794 Canning noted ambivalence in support for the war in the political circles that he frequented, discouraged by the success of the French armies: ‘I heard … from young as well as old, of the changes that were working in people’s opinions about the War, that I scarcely knew whom to consider as stout and safe.’30 As a devoted follower of Pitt, Canning took immense care to persuade the waverers among his friends of the necessity of continuing the war. He recorded at great length in his journal the arguments he had with one of his Christ Church circle, Lord Boringdon, in January 1795. Boringdon was of the opinion that, while Pitt was the only leader fit to run the country, the war should still be abandoned: ‘While he [Boringdon] continues to vote with Government in Parlt., because he wishes not to turn out Pitt, yet talks and thinks against them in private, because he wishes peace to be made.’31 Canning employed his burgeoning eloquence in a conversation of several hours to change his friend’s mind.
Howe’s victory was but a single ray of sunshine in the dark prospect of 1794, made gloomier by further domestic unrest. The comfortably off in the grander parts of London, such as Mayfair or St James’s, had been threatened several times by demonstrating crowds. By the end of October 1795 matters seemed to be out of control, and revolution spreading across the Channel, when the king’s coach was jeered with shouts for ‘Bread and Peace’ as he went to open parliament. Afterwards the king returned to Buckingham House in a private coach, which the crowd again tried to stop, though he was rescued by the Life Guards. As the now empty state coach returned to the Royal Mews along Pall Mall, it was pelted with stones until every window was broken. Pieces broken from the coach were later sold for as much as sixpence in the street.32 Within a matter of weeks Pitt pushed the repressive ‘Two Acts’ – the Treason Act and the Seditious Meetings Act – through parliament, and the oppressive domestic laws known by opponents as ‘Pitt’s Terror’ had begun.*
In this atmosphere of crisis, the moderate Whigs, led by the duke of Portland, took fright. Already by December 1793 Portland (courted all the while by Pitt) had broken with Fox after two years of wrangling over the Whig Party’s attitude to the French Revolution and to the war. Early the following year, together with William Windham, Portland brought over sixty supporters to the government (‘Alarmists’, as they were called), making the prime minister’s political authority unassailable. The realignment of 1794 effectively kept the Whigs from power for the next forty years, with the exception of one brief administration between 1806 and 1807 lasting only fourteen months.
The negotiations between the Pitt government and the Whigs were complex, with some existing ministers very dubious about the wisdom of a coalition government, particularly Henry Dundas, who, although he was Pitt’s great friend and ally, had to give up the Home Office to Portland. Pitt wanted Dundas to take on a new department, as secretary of state for war. Dundas threatened to resign, believing that a new, separate department would lack power. He wrote to Pitt: ‘All modern Wars are a Contention of Purse, and unless some very peculiar Circumstance occurs … the Minister for Finance must be the Minister for War.’ Pitt pleaded, confessing to being ‘really completely heart broken’ at the prospect of Dundas resigning. Finally the king persuaded Dundas to change his mind. Ultimately his personal relationship with Pitt allowed Dundas to maintain his dominant cabinet position, and the doubts of the new secretary for war were never realized. In a political career lasting nearly a quarter of a century, he arguably played his most distinguished role in this post over the next seven years. The addition of the colonies to the department’s responsibilities in 1801 lasted until the Crimean War.33
The Portland Whigs negotiated five cabinet places, two with senior war responsibilities. Portland took the Home Office and Lord Spencer became first lord of the Admiralty. In spite of his great reluctance to speak in public, William Cavendish-Bentinck, third duke of Portland, had already had a distinguished career in high office, and had nominally been prime minister in the short-lived Fox–North government in the early 1780s. As home secretary, he took a hard line in countering domestic unrest. A confirmed supporter of the theories of Adam Smith, he was always reluctant for the government to intervene in the markets to buy food for the populace, as it had to do in 1795 and 1796.
William Windham, though popularly tipped to be home secretary, reluctantly took the job of secretary at war. Pitt agreed that, although the position was not usually one of cabinet rank, Windham should attend cabinet meetings. Windham was rich, scholarly and popular, a sparkling conversationalist and orator: Macaulay was to call him ‘the first gentleman of his age’.34 Possessing great wealth, living in the east of the county of Norfolk, he hardly had his finger on the pulse of the country. As with many brilliant men, he was not a successful minister. He had a reputation for not attending his office, a disastrous trait since the role of secretary at war was essentially that of a bureaucrat, and his distaste for Dundas’s brashness was unhelpful to relations at the centre of government.35 Gilbert Elliot felt Windham was totally disqualified ‘for any useful exertion, either in office or out of it’. Lady Holland was to label him ‘more splendid than useful in public’.36 The shrewdest judgement on Windham came from the Duche
ss of Devonshire: ‘I think he is prejudiced and often led, and therefore unfit to lead others. If being well-meaning would alone do, he would do well.’37 Windham’s great passion in the 1790s was supporting the Vendéan royalists, and, largely as a result of his advocacy, an expedition of 3,000 royalist troops in fifty transports, escorted by warships under Sir John Borlase Warren, sailed in June 1795, and were landed at Quiberon, where they were cut to pieces by General Hoche. In parliament, Pitt defended the operation by pointing out that ‘No English blood had been shed.’ Sheridan replied, ‘That is true, but English honour has been shed from every pore.’38
Lord Spencer was a noticeable improvement over Lord Chatham as first lord of the Admiralty, but had experience neither of government nor of the navy. Spencer also had a difficult time with some senior sea officers, the most serious incident being the court-martialling of Admiral William Cornwallis, who had acted with great distinction in maintaining the blockade of the French Channel ports and was to do so again. But this quarrel ensured that that gritty and useful admiral did not serve during Spencer’s administration. The first lord also had little hesitation in securing the resignation of Admiral Sir Charles Middleton from the Admiralty Board in November 1795, to which he had been appointed by Lord Chatham in May 1794. Middleton had tried to block the appointment of a relatively junior flag officer that Spencer wished to make; Spencer insisted on passing over a naval officer whom Middleton had known and respected for many years.39* The strong tradition of automatic appointment by seniority rather than by merit was a significant weakness of both army and navy in the early years of the war. It would take some time to ease out the older officers and bring the younger and more vigorous ones to the upper ranks of both services.