by Roger Knight
find some fault in the arrangements made by his predecessor, if it be only to change them, in order to show his own superior discerning. Lord Barham … was satisfied for things to go on in their usual course, to remain quiet in his own room … In fact, he never attended the Board; but when any doubtful question arose, one of the Lords or the Secretaries took his decision on it in his own room.47
This degree of delegation worked well, not least because of the experience of the junior lords of the Admiralty. Sir Philip Stephens, first appointed second secretary of the Board as early as 1759, and Sir Evan Nepean, who succeeded to the Board in September 1804 after his brief period of office in Ireland, had between them well over fifty years experience of attending the Board as secretary.* With Barham, they saw the Admiralty through the complex strategic moves of 1805.
In August, Pitt signed the Third Coalition with Austria and Russia, and the same month saw the arrival of Nelson in England after chasing the combined French and Spanish fleets to the West Indies and back. He put back to sea with refreshed ships, hoisting his flag on 14 September and by the end of the month had taken command of Collingwood’s fleet, which was blockading the French and Spanish in Cádiz Harbour. With superior ships and sea-hardened crews, bolstered by leadership which stemmed from well-justified confidence, Nelson earned the overwhelming victory at Trafalgar on 21 October. He had promised Pitt the annihilation of the enemy fleet and he delivered it, though at the cost of his own life. News of the victory reached London in the early hours of 6 November. Three days later an ailing William Pitt experienced a last flash of popularity when he attended the Lord Mayor’s Banquet. His carriage was hauled along by excited, cheering crowds. At the banquet he was hailed as ‘the Saviour of Europe’. His speech was very short: ‘I return you many thanks for the honour you have done me; but Europe is not to be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, I trust, save Europe by her example.’ He was a very sick man, with what was probably a peptic ulceration of the stomach.48 It was the last time that he spoke in public.49
Yet French control of the Continent had not been weakened by the great triumph at sea. A day before Trafalgar, one Austrian army was defeated at Ulm by the French and another ten days later at Caldiero in Italy. The rest of Pitt’s coalition strategy failed: two amphibious expeditions that landed on the Continent, at Naples and in north Germany, were completely ineffectual. Pitt tried to regain his health by going to Bath to drink the waters. Then, on 29 December 1805, came devastating news: a combined Russian–Austrian army had been utterly defeated by an outnumbered Napoleon at Austerlitz in his most brilliant victory yet. The result was that Austria was driven out of the war (although Russia continued its alliance with Britain until 1807). It was the end of the Third Coalition, and it struck a bitter blow to the depressed and sickly Pitt, now hardly able to eat.* Wilberforce was convinced that the news of this defeat physically affected the prime minister, already worn out and emaciated. Less than a month later, on 23 January 1806, Pitt was dead. His surgeon said later ‘that Pitt died of old age at forty-six, as much as if he had been ninety’.50
Pitt’s illnesses were well known, but he had always recovered. Those close to him were shocked. Pitt’s cousin Lord Grenville, with whom there had been so many arguments, in ‘an agony of tears’ retired to his country seat at Dropmore for several days, though this retreat may also have had an element of political calculation. Fox, Grey and Sheridan withdrew a planned censure motion in the Commons and substituted a debate on ‘the state of the nation’.51 The political response that followed was complex. A private motion describing Pitt as ‘an excellent statesman’ was carried by 258 to 89. It was opposed by the ever unpredictable William Windham, former member of Pitt’s cabinet, still smarting from the rejection of his ideas for attacking the Vendée in the early years of the previous war, who had criticized Pitt’s handling of the French Revolutionary War and described Trafalgar as a defeat. With a greater show of unanimity, the House voted by a large majority the enormous sum of £40,000 to pay off Pitt’s debts. Not the least of Pitt’s exceptional qualities was his complete lack of interest in profiting from office. Even so, the parliamentary grant was sufficient only because friends chose not to reimburse themselves for their loans to him. Pitt’s coffin lay in state in the Painted Chamber of the House of Lords, viewed ‘by a vast concourse’ of people. His funeral at St Paul’s on 22 February 1806 took place only six weeks after the great procession and ceremony for Nelson. Pitt’s obsequies were more modest, though much the same music was sung and played in the two services. Nevertheless, three royal dukes attended, with the duke of York ‘much affected’.52
Without Pitt’s leadership, his ministry dissolved. His strong lieutenants of the 1790s were not only unavailable but had contributed to his political weakness: Melville was disgraced and Grenville had been estranged. After the usual period of negotiation, it was Grenville who now formed a new government on 10 February 1806, in alliance with the leading Whig Charles James Fox, who became foreign secretary. Since 1804 Grenville had wanted a ministry that would ‘comprehend all the talents and character’ in public life; and, although the term ‘Ministry of All the Talents’ was used ironically by opponents, it is nonetheless the term by which it has become generally known. Windham in particular believed that the new administration would be a fresh and less party-political government committed to reform, but it turned out to be the usual mixture of alliances and compromises. Indeed, it was a strange mixture of politicians altogether. Perhaps the most curious was the inclusion of the lord chief justice, Lord Ellenborough. Putting the most senior criminal judge in the cabinet was controversial, but it was part of the price of Lord Sidmouth’s (as Addington now became) support.53 The Foxite element in the new administration wanted reform and cost-cutting, as did Grenville, but he was politically weakened by the sinecures that were held by his family: it was hardly a good platform from which to launch his reforming programme.*
Throughout the Talents’ brief period of office, the country was relieved of any threat of invasion by Napoleon, which had been looming for two years after the Peace of Amiens. In late August 1805 he had led his armies away from the Channel ports and marched to central Europe, where he consolidated French power. He dominated central Germany, securing the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in August 1806, and was victorious over Prussia by the victories of Jena and Auerstädt in October 1806. In June the next year Russia was beaten at the Battle of Friedland and neutralized by the Treaty of Tilsit. Charles James Fox, now foreign secretary, tried to make peace with France, but his convictions about the greatness of Napoleon were shaken by negotiations with a militarily dominant emperor. It is difficult to discern a coherent strategy. Fox and Windham, the latter now secretary of state for war, avoided Pitt’s policy of coalitions with the central European powers, and left them to their fate.54 Instead, Windham enthusiastically embarked upon expeditions in the Mediterranean, in contradiction to all his earlier ideas, overwhelming more cautious ministers. Only Admiral Collingwood, left without interference, maintained a defensive position in the Western Mediterranean, keeping trade flowing and the French Fleet confined in Toulon.
The new government started cheerfully enough. Four days after the newly appointed first lord of the Admiralty, Charles Grey, arrived in his office, news of Sir John Duckworth’s victory at San Domingo reached London: five French ships of the line had been captured or destroyed.* The secretary to the Board, William Marsden, recorded that ‘It has put everyone (out and in), as you may suppose, in high spirits, and it is really a famous event.’† In January 1806 troops under Sir David Baird retook the Cape from the Dutch. The chief difficulty was not overcoming the defence, but in landing from the boats through the surf: forty-one soldiers from the 93rd Highland Regiment were drowned.55 But these successes proved to be a false dawn. Three inept military initiatives followed and failed one by one. Duckworth was sent to the Dardanelles with a fleet to put pressure on the Turk
s in order to aid Russia. He passed the Dardanelles in mid February 1807, but was not the most subtle or diplomatic admiral, and failed to persuade the Turks. He should have had more help from Charles Arbuthnot, who by this time was ambassador at Constantinople; but Arbuthnot was tired, depressed and inactive. In early March the British Fleet had to withdraw under fire: Turkish guns and the swift current through the Narrows sent Duckworth away with nothing except casualties and damage to his ships.56 A small expedition landed in Egypt in March 1807, the purpose of which was to forestall an unlikely French invasion, but it was twice defeated and ordered home by the next government.57
The third in this trio of misfortunes was an expedition foisted on the government by the extraordinary Sir Home Popham, who in early 1806 sailed from the Cape of Good Hope across the southern Atlantic to the River Plate, with the intention of occupying enemy Spanish territory. The idea for a daring initiative of this nature had been around for some years, but Popham was acting without direct orders.58
At first, surprise overwhelmed the Spanish, and Buenos Aires was captured in June 1806 and Montevideo in February 1807. When the news reached England, merchants hastened to fill ships with goods to trade with the newly acquired territory. However, military failure soon overtook the British expedition. Both cities were recaptured, and the attempt to retake Buenos Aires was thwarted by local Spanish volunteers, who compelled the surrender of Lieutenant-General John Whitelocke and his force of over 6,000 troops and seamen in July 1807. On the walls at Buenos Aires angry and mortified British soldiers scribbled: ‘General Whitelocke is a coward, a traitor or both.’ One of the disgusted officers wrote:
History will record, and posterity with difficulty will believe, that such an army as ours capitulated with the rabble of a South American town, and sold the interests of the country, and gave up the hard-earned conquests of their brother soldiers, in order to secure a retreat which it was most amply in their power to have made at their good pleasure … Would to God the waters of Oblivion were as near at hand as are those of La Plata!59
The army and the public (particularly the merchants, many of whom were ruined) demanded a scapegoat. Whitelocke was fortunate to be merely ‘cashiered, and declared totally unfit, and unworthy to serve His Majesty in any military capacity whatever’, as the sentence of the court martial expressed it.60 Many thought that his ineptitude was on a par with that of Admiral Byng, who had been shot for cowardice in 1757. Popham, who was also court-martialled, claimed that he had acted upon a verbal agreement that he had had with Pitt, who by then had died; fortunately for Popham, the news of the military disaster arrived only after he had got away with a censure.*
Windham’s unsuccessful role in the conduct of the war overseas was matched at home by his maverick treatment of all sections of the army, in which he was influenced by the journalist William Cobbett. In May 1806, with his first Army Estimates, Windham announced reductions in the cavalry, Foot Guards and the artillery Royal Waggon Train, reckoning to save £363,000 a year from these measures.61 In order to make the service more appealing and to boost regular army recruitment, he limited the time that a man should serve in the army to seven years, against the advice of the inspector general of recruiting. Since 1802 legislation had prohibited militiamen joining the regular army, due to opposition from the lords lieutenant and the officers commanding the militia.62 In order to encourage further army enlistment, Windham suspended the militia ballot for two years, but the measure failed. Lord Grenville complained privately to Charles Abbot of ‘Windham’s utter unacquaintance with militia and county affairs’.63 As the legislation went through parliament, the king grumbled to Windham, as usual in the third person, that ‘he has reluctantly acquiesced in the Change of a System with which He was Himself perfectly satisfied.’64 The new measure made no difference to army recruiting and saved hardly any money: the army cost £18,581,000 in 1805 and £18,507,000 in 1806.65
Windham’s policies towards the volunteers were both doctrinaire and counter-productive. He had always distrusted them, particularly fearing the democratic propensities of the urban regiments.* Yet he was the colonel of the Norfolk 4th Battalion, one of the most inefficient units in the country, which gave him, as Spencer Perceval pointed out cuttingly in debate, particular authority to denounce the volunteers as a useless extravagance.66 As the volunteers were exempt from the militia ballot, Windham saw them as a hindrance to militia recruitment: in the Commons he referred sarcastically to the volunteers as ‘painted cherries which none but simple birds would take for real fruit’.67 Over 11,000 volunteers resigned immediately: the force that Addington and Pitt had fostered, and that the duke of York had made reasonably efficient, was virtually destroyed.68 The secretary of state for war was not to be reasoned with. Lord Grenville, the prime minister, who was a lieutenant-colonel in the Buckinghamshire Yeomanry, asked Windham to soften his outspokenness to allay the fears of his many critics, to which Windham replied, ‘I should only disgrace myself, without satisfying them.’ Windham was in office for only just over a year but the confusion that ensued as a result of his decisions lasted until the following Tory ministry. Wilberforce, acutely, recorded in a notebook that ‘Windham is a most wretched man of business, no precision or knowledge of details, even in his own measures.’69
It was, however, the Ministry of All the Talents that made the first really significant move in economic warfare, which had started almost immediately after the Peace of Amiens, when the French Army occupied Hanover in June 1803. The emperor had tried to exclude British trade from the Elbe, Weser and Ems, and prohibited not only imported British manufactured goods but also any from British colonies. In May 1806, frustrated after its failed peace moves, the government instituted what became known as the ‘Fox Blockade’, named after the foreign secretary, Charles James Fox. An order-in-council was issued that declared all Continental ports between the Elbe and Brest to be under a state of blockade, and that ships could trade with ports beyond this area only if they had loaded their cargoes in ports of countries friendly to Britain.70 This ‘paper’ blockade did not conform to international agreements, by which a particular port had to be watched closely and continually by warships before it could be said to be in a state of blockade. The declaration of such a large area of blockade was justified, at least in British eyes, and it allowed warships to stop any neutral vessels in order to inspect documents and cargoes. Britain could hardly keep a squadron of large warships off every French port, but they did deploy large numbers of recently built small warships, which were kept at sea for long periods by improved victualling arrangements. The watch on the French and other Continental ports under their dominance was maintained by British frigates and the smaller brig-sloops, and captures were mostly of merchant ships.
Napoleon retaliated after his victory at Jena in October 1806. In November, the Berlin Decrees were issued by France. The preamble referred aggressively to the ‘barbarian’ British orders-in-council of May, and the text declared that all trade and correspondence by European countries, even neutral ones, with the British Isles was forbidden and any British goods being traded on the Continent were to be seized. Neutral ships that called in to Britain on the way to a French port were to depart without discharging any cargo; if the ship’s master tried to conceal that he had done so, both the ship and the master would be seized.71 The Continental blockade was thus started, economic warfare which was to endanger British trade and which was to last until Napoleon’s downfall.72
In September 1806 Charles Grey, now Lord Howick, was appointed foreign secretary on the death of Charles James Fox, and Tom Grenville, who had been on the margins of power for many years, was made first lord of the Admiralty. A rich bachelor and bibliophile, mild and amiable, popular where his brothers were not, he nevertheless shared the Grenville family’s characteristic coldness of manner, very marked when he spoke publicly. One young Whig, Francis Horner, noted his ‘indiscriminate emphasis … comes to have no more effect in one respect, than no emphasis at
all … at the same time … your attention is fretted & worried by … misplaced phrases & emphasis upon nothings’.73 To Lord Grenville’s disappointment, his brother failed to establish himself as leader of the government in the Commons. Tom Grenville felt that his close friend Lord Spencer would do better at the Admiralty if Spencer resumed his old post. ‘I feel much disposed to doubt,’ he wrote to his other brother, the marquis of Buckingham, ‘whether I can be of any good service by entering into this sea of troubles which will engross all my time & annihilate me for the H of Commons.’74
Tom Grenville served as first lord for only twenty-one weeks. He never again sought high office, and soon after he left the Admiralty he even tried to give up his parliamentary seat. In spite of this diffidence, he chose his Board sensibly and dealt with some difficult senior appointments for admirals, at a time when the available talent was thin. He worked hard, six days a week, with office hours between ten and six in the evening.* With his private secretary, Edward Golding, he grappled conscientiously with the problem that beset every first lord of the Admiralty in these years: in spite of the increased number of ships in commission, the number of applications for promotions and posts vastly exceeded the numbers available. By this time, the attractions of the naval service had produced an upsurge in young officers, fostered by the practice during the previous war of captains making their own choice of the number of midshipmen they took to sea. The mechanics of appointing this surfeit of officers had also become absurdly over-centralized and even more oppressive than in the time of Lord Howe in the 1780s, when he had complained about it in parliament.