by Roger Knight
Spencer acquired a reputation for giving way to the sea officers on the Board on matters of policy. The outspoken Dundas wrote to the first lord in 1798, exhorting him to: ‘Exercise your understanding, and if your Board don’t support your opinions and your measures, send them to sea or find others in their place.’40 William Huskisson, undersecretary of state for war (with characteristic asperity) wrote to Dundas: ‘The Plain Fact is that Lord Spencer wants firmness. He is not master at his own board, while Admiral Young, who is, has a little, jealous, overbearing mind, which opposes or thwarts every scheme he does not himself suggest.’41 While Huskisson’s judgement could be ascribed to jealousy between departments, Young, as a French-speaking, highly intelligent, punctilious young rear-admiral, did irritate others, in and out of the service, and was instinctively cautious. Lord St Vincent (as Admiral Sir John Jervis became in June 1797), commanding the Channel Fleet at the time, was critical of the principle of appointing professional naval officers as Admiralty commissioners in general and of Young in particular: ‘It is incomprehensible to me why he keeps more than one Seaman at the Board, for they do nothing, but confound, impede & distract.’42 (Although, as usual with St Vincent, he said one thing and did another: when he was appointed first lord in 1801, three sea officers and one civilian were on his Board.)
Although Britain began to lose the initiative in the French West Indies, Dundas maintained their conquest as top priority. After the expedition of 1793–4 under Grey and Jervis, a large force was assembled in the spring and summer of 1795 under Major General Ralph Abercromby and Rear-Admiral Hugh Christian. The deadline set for sailing from England was 15 September. Dundas ruthlessly stripped the best troops from units destined for other purposes in the Mediterranean and India and Spencer likewise took ships from the North Sea Fleet to escort the transports across the Atlantic.43 The government needed 30,000 troops for the expedition, but it could raise only 18,000. The king refused point blank to release his guardsmen. All these preparations were dogged by misunderstandings between the admirals and generals, inter-service friction over discipline on board the transports and delays in assembling shipping.
Dundas, chafing in Whitehall, put back the sailing date until October, urging everyone to great effort. The expedition was certainly well equipped. Though late in arriving at Spithead because they needed repair, sixteen East Indiamen were invaluable as troop transports: to man them the Company raised 3,000 seamen at its own expense.44 Their holds were loaded with the bricks needed for military buildings in San Domingo. Sixteen storeships carried twenty-four portable timber blockhouses. Eight ships of the line and ten frigates and sloops escorted twelve naval victuallers, eleven Ordnance storeships and four hospital ships. The 18,000 soldiers were carried by 110 transports. With them sailed merchantmen destined for the Mediterranean as well as the West Indies. The great convoy finally left Spithead on 16 November, a mild sunny day, but well into the season of dangerous autumn gales. Only a day later, when the ships were off Weymouth, a violent south-west gale struck. There were collisions, and some ships foundered. Most were driven back to Spithead, some swept all the way up the English Channel. Five ships went ashore on the Chesil Bank, where 249 officers and men were drowned, their bodies washed up on the beach.45 The convoy had started with 236 ships but ended up on 29 January 1796 with 35.46 The expedition was in tatters. A muster taken in February 1796 showed over 11,000 men back in Portsmouth, with 7,000 unaccounted for, presumed to be in the West Indies. Abercromby did not reach Barbados until 21 April 1796. Dundas had put too much of a strain upon Britain’s war machinery.
Only in distant waters was there success, though not directly at the expense of the French, but rather of the divided Dutch nation, now occupied by France. Dundas’s East India Company connections ensured that a small force was quickly off the mark in the early summer of 1795, sailing to secure the Cape and Dutch East Indies, having taken advantage of the presence of the fugitive Dutch stadtholder, the prince of Orange, in London to give authority to the expedition. The squadron was commanded by Vice-Admiral George Keith Elphinstone, with a force of only 3,000 men under General Craig; they had orders to sail on to Ceylon to take Trincomalee as well.47 At the Cape, the Dutch were unprepared and morale was low: they had just over 500 infantry and 400 gunners. A bombardment was followed by lengthy negotiations, during which the British dug themselves into a good position. Food ran short for the invasion force, but Dutch resistance crumbled quickly. The Cape was taken on 16 September not in the name of the prince of Orange, but of the British crown. The Dutch felt deeply betrayed, and their local commander committed suicide.48 Nevertheless, the next year Elphinstone was able to demand the surrender of an inferior Dutch squadron that arrived to try to relieve the Cape. Trincomalee, an immense, sheltered harbour in Ceylon, had fallen even more easily at the end of August.49
These small successes, though important for colonial security, were but sideshows to the main struggle in the West Indies. By October 1795, 52 regiments were either on their way to the islands or had already arrived; 53 were stretched out over the rest of the world, in the East Indies, the Cape, Canada, Gibraltar and Corsica, or on board warships, as there was also a considerable shortage of marines.50 Eventually Abercromby achieved success in a confused and disparate war against French colonists, troops and rebels, where holding on to gains was almost as difficult as the initial assault on the French islands. St Lucia, St Vincent and Grenada were captured, Jamaica pacified, and the Dutch South American colonies were secured. In 1796 and 1797 a further, much smaller expedition was led by Abercromby, with Admiral Harvey as the naval commander. When Spain entered the war against Britain in late 1796, Trinidad became a target. It was captured in February 1797 with spectacular success and prize money. Spanish resistance there was minimal, but the Spaniards fought with courage and skill during the British assault on San Juan, Puerto Rico, forcing Abercromby to abandon the attack.
The abiding image of the West Indies campaigns is one of disease, which accounted for horrific British casualties. Between 1793 and 1801, 89,000 private soldiers and NCOs served in the West Indies. Half of them died: the exact figure was 43,747.* If discharges and desertions are included, the figure for losses is 62,250, a staggering 70 per cent.51 The crews of transports and the navy also suffered badly. Such death rates among sea officers were never to be surpassed at any point in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.52
These great losses accentuated the problem of manpower shortages, something that was to dog successive British governments for twenty years of war, and affected both the army and the navy. By the middle of 1793 parliament had voted money for 45,000 seamen; a year later money for 85,000, although this figure was an intention and had no bearing on numbers actually aboard the ships. Impressment was responsible for only a small proportion of recruited seamen, at particular times of emergency: the King’s Bounty, steadily inducing volunteers to join, proved to be more effective.† The real problem was competition for skilled seamen with a merchant marine that was still expanding and, because wages rose in wartime, paid better. An estimated 81,534 seamen in 1794 were employed in merchant ships, in comparison with the 83,891 in the navy.53 In addition a relatively small number of privateers were also being fitted out at the start of the war, although they absorbed far fewer men. By 1795 parliament had voted money for 100,000 seamen. To meet the shortfall, in February of that year Pitt brought forward bills forcing shipowners to supply men to the navy, at one man for every seventy-five tons of shipping, hoping that this would raise about 18,000 men. Hostile reaction was immediate. In Whitehaven, for instance, the shipowners met at the Black Lion on 7 February 1795 to petition parliament, reckoning by the tonnage of their registered shipping that they would have to raise 761 men, and put forward persuasive arguments that this measure would ‘annihilate our Coal Trade’.54 It took far more time to raise men than the government had estimated. In March 1795 the government then tried to implement the Quota Acts, which required each county to r
aise a specific number of men for the navy.55 This met smart opposition from the county members, and, though men were found, the process was still a slow one. The Acts were very complicated, with twenty-three different forms of orders and returns appended. The legal and administrative procedures involved parish overseers and justices of the peace, as well as the local Quarter Sessions, and in some cases parishes preferred to pay a fine, rather than raise their allotted number of men. The whole of Kent, for instance, a populous county with seagoing centres at Deptford, Woolwich, Chatham and Dover, raised just 500 men in 1796 and 1797, enough to man only a 64-gun warship.56 It has been argued that these Acts were the first step towards conscription, but, if so, they were little more than a tiptoe.57 The delays and complications of the quota system demonstrate why Great Britain could find no alternative to impressment when men were needed, however brutal it appeared then and still appears today.
It was a similar story with the land forces. Shortages of recruits at home were worrying.* In 1793 the army abroad numbered 18,194, though with the expansion of the war, particularly in the West Indies, it increased rapidly to 41,494 by 1794.58 In the early years of the war recruitment was boosted by the Scots and Irish, who made up half the regular British Army in 1793 and 1794. With only one tenth of the population of the United Kingdom, Scotland provided a fifth of its military manpower, and of 56 regiments added to the line in 1794, 22 were Irish. Not surprisingly, however, particular difficulties were experienced in raising men for service in the West Indies. There was resistance from units already recruited in Essex and Newcastle, who refused to sign the muster book. In Ireland the atmosphere was even more tense. Loyal regiments had to be brought in to quell dissident troops protesting against embarkation in Dublin and Cork. In Dublin three days of riots in August 1795 brought city life to a standstill, with the soldiers ending their protest only when the cavalry, artillery and 2,000 militia faced them down. In Cork a full-blown mutiny did not give way until cannon were brought in: six mutineers were sentenced to be shot, and the NCOs were reduced to privates.59
The need for more troops became acute. Nevertheless, in the second half of the 1790s, recruitment eventually gathered momentum. In Ireland, after the invasion scares and rebellion in the country, the total of regular, militia and voluntary troops, which had languished at about 30,000 in 1797, reached over 100,000 by 1799.60 This brought the theoretical strength of the home garrison throughout Great Britain and Ireland to about 100,000, and it varied between 65,000 and 110,000 troops for most of the French Revolutionary War.61
One consequence of the manpower shortage was a reliance on foreign troops. In 1799 one officer of the 60th Regiment recorded that battalions were composed entirely of foreigners: ‘Russians, Poles, Germans, Italians, French, etc.: we had one Cingalese. These men were enlisted from the foreign brigade, viz. the Duc de Castre’s corps, York hussars, chasseurs Britannique, le regiment de Mortemarte, and Prince Charles of Levenstein’s corps etc.’ The York Hussars, he added, ‘were raised in Germany, and about 150 of them were Hungarians; their complexions very dark, and they wore large mustaches’.62 If a French royalist was ever captured, his fate was death, as Harry Calvert reported after the surrender of Nieuport in 1794: ‘300 men of the Corps of Chartres formed part of the garrison, and I am afraid there can be no doubt in regard to the fate of these unfortunate men.’63 Again, not surprisingly, the quality of these troops was poor, and they performed very badly in the West Indies, with high desertion rates. In 1797 Abercromby wrote to Henry Dundas in disgust: ‘I clearly see that the German Regiments raised by adventurers will not answer. They are at best to be compared to the condottiers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.’64
Backing up the regular troops were the traditional county militia regiments, which were used for invasion defence duties or to control domestic unrest, and subject to military discipline. They were established by annual Militia Acts passed by parliament, and raised by ballots held in local towns and parishes.65 An individual could avoid service by paying for a substitute, of which there were many. The Oxford Militia in 1796, for instance, included 43 men from Coventry, Abingdon, Berkshire and even from distant Suffolk and Shropshire.* However, it was soon seen that the militia could be a good source of men for the regular army, and successive Militia Acts, starting with the first in 1796, began transferring men to the regular army, a process which was much expanded in the Napoleonic War.66
The early duties of the militia regiments were directed towards control of domestic order, and they were kept on the move so that fraternization with the local population was kept to a minimum. Inevitably in these early days, instances of the breakdown of discipline were numerous. When the price of flour and grain rose in 1794 and 1795, the militia food allowance of fivepence a day did not go far, and some units became involved in disturbances. During 1795 militiamen took part in sixteen food riots. In Portsmouth the Gloucestershire Militia forced butchers to lower their prices. Plymouth and Chichester suffered riotous behaviour by militia from Northamptonshire and Hertfordshire respectively. In Seaford in Sussex, the Oxford Militia, stationed there because of the invasion scare and responsible for order in the county, plundered meat from the populace.† The authorities took strong measures and five militiamen were hanged. In May 1795 Robert Banks Jenkinson and his regiment were ordered to Brighton to keep the peace when two soldiers of the Oxfordshire regiment were to be shot for rioting and pulling down flour-mills. Far from the light-heartedness of early 1794, Canning recorded that Jenkinson ‘puts on a most formidable appearance of resolution’.67
Opinion of the militiamen was divided, their effectiveness dependent on local politics, the law and the determination of local magistrates.* The duke of Gloucester, a professional soldier, was not confident of their performance in the event of invasion, ‘not from the men being bad, but from the Ignorance of the Officers, and as they are well aware of their own incapacity to command they will be diffident of themselves, and Confusion will be constant’.68 But, as the wars wore on, there can be no doubt of the increasing usefulness of the militia, and the experience of a military life was to be a great asset for recruits to the regular army.69
In Ireland, it was different. Deep-seated weaknesses in society were perceived by Edward Cooke, undersecretary in Dublin Castle. In 1793 he wrote to Evan Nepean of ‘a mountainous, poor, oppressed, numerous and Catholic rabble with whom no gentry reside, among whom there is no parish system … who have been and are ill-used by their landlords’. His analysis was grim and proved to be correct: ‘they can only be kept down by power.’70 Here, the implementation of the Militia Acts caused violent and sustained disturbances, in contrast to the previous peacefulness in Ireland. Food riots were unknown and, until the beginning of the war, there had been much less domestic unrest than in England.71 Raising the militia caused disaffection towards the British government, as well as divisions between Protestants and Catholics. Attacks were made on soldiers who tried to enforce the Acts, and loss of life became commonplace. During this period militia regiments were formed but always with great difficulty. In some areas in Ireland, militias could be raised by paid substitutes alone and the ballot recruitment system was quietly abandoned.
There remained another way to avoid militia service: a man could join the local volunteers. Volunteers were locally raised infantry and cavalry, paid by the government and used at first for static defence of government property or military installations. A minority of volunteer corps were formed in the industrial areas of the East Midlands, Lancashire and Yorkshire, composed mainly of the middle classes, who feared social unrest.72 Only if the volunteers were called out to active service would they be, as the Act of 1794 stated, ‘subject to Military Discipline as the rest of His Majesty’s Regular and Militia Troops’, although no volunteers could be tried by court martial unless the court was composed of volunteer officers.73 Volunteer recruitment proceeded slowly between 1794 and 1796, with 160 corps raised, including yeoman cavalry, mostly from the cou
nties with the greatest threat of invasion. From 1794 volunteer regiments or battalions guarded and assisted the working of coastal batteries. Scotland raised nine volunteer Fencible battalions (the equivalent of English volunteers), then another sixteen with the first of the invasion threats in 1794.74 Later the better-trained units supported the field armies in measures against invasion, the rest remaining in their localities undertaking guard, escort and police duties. This limited role was reduced in January 1798, when training budgets were cut, but the government was able to reverse its policy later in the year and set more generous allowances for training and service. Some corps were willing to travel away from their localities, while others prepared themselves for guarding prisoners of war or convoying army supply trains in the event of invasion. In London the government even incorporated the eight most efficient corps into the capital’s garrison.75
The volunteers, however, were fair game to caricaturists and satirists, who made the most out of their portly efforts at marching or on horseback. One volunteer, Edward Law, later Lord Ellenborough, the lord chief justice, was mimicked on the London stage. A diarist noted that Law ‘moved with a sort of semi-rotatory step, and his path to the place to which he wished to go was the section of a parabola’. He was turned out of the Lincoln’s Inn Volunteers for awkwardness.76 Yet much evidence points to considerable volunteer discipline and enthusiasm. When not on active service, which was almost all the time, discipline for the mass of the volunteers was self-imposed. In Dorset the Piddletown Light Infantry drew up their own rules. Rule 5 reads: ‘Whoever Speaks, or Laughs in the Ranks, after the word attention is given, or until after the order stand at ease, to be fined Sixpence’. Rule 10: ‘Whoever appears on Parade in Liquor, shall be fined Five Shillings.’ Using his musket privately would cost a man 2s.6d. Fines were collected fortnightly.77 These makeshift measures clearly had some effect, and the volunteers on occasion demonstrated considerable initiative.*