by Roger Knight
This bloody battle proved to be the climatic end of hostilities. Napoleon surrendered to the British and was held on the Bellerophon, which anchored in Plymouth Sound from late July for eight days; he was viewed every evening by a curious British public. On 9 August he sailed in the Northumberland from Torbay and after a passage of sixty-seven days reached St Helena. Castlereagh wrote to his stepbrother, Charles Stewart, on 4 December 1815: ‘We have received intelligence today of Buonaparte’s arrival at St Helena on 22nd October, he was out of sorts on landing.’27 Behind this laconic irony lay over a dozen years of extreme risk and danger to Britain. After the start of the war in 1803 came a decade of dour struggle, with little to cheer the populace after the victories at Trafalgar in 1805 and San Domingo in 1806. The seizure of the Danish Fleet at Copenhagen in 1807 brought only muted applause because of its doubtful legality, and the successful retrieval of the Portuguese royal family and the Portuguese Fleet in November 1807 hardly seemed like a victory, important though these operations were. The same could be said of the dogged command of Collingwood, skilfully deploying the Mediterranean Fleet, and the efforts of the Baltic Fleet under Saumarez, which enabled trade to flow and military supplies to be delivered.28
This was not an age when ministers committed their ideas on long-term policy or strategy to paper.* The long strategy of naval defensive containment, backed up by the training and arming of large swathes of the population, seemed obvious and hardly needed clarification. Britain wanted to take offensive action against France and continuously sought the support of allies. Pitt’s early policy of building alliances with those nations in danger of being overwhelmed by France was the correct one and persisted to the end. No single nation could have defeated Napoleonic France. There were many disappointments: before 1812, Napoleon managed to pick off individual countries, and coalitions frequently broke down. He was, after all, rarely bested on the battlefield in central Europe. However, Austria, Prussia and particularly Russia had large populations that could be offset against this; and, although Britain lacked such an asset, its wealth allowed it to subsidize its allies’ armies and effectively purchase the necessary manpower.
After the Battle of Leipzig, the French populace no longer offered Napoleon its unequivocal support. The Napoleonic War had always been a war of manpower attrition, and it was fortunate indeed that the French emperor’s miscalculations and spendthrift military gambling had the effect of cutting down his vastly superior resources. He had abandoned his army in Egypt in 1799 and had seen his armies in the Peninsula waste away. The enormous casualties sustained in Russia were followed by huge French losses in Germany in 1813. By 1815 the emperor, though the army was loyal to him, had lost the support of the French people, for the lives of too many young men had been lost in his wars. It has been estimated that the loss of nearly a million represents possibly a higher proportion of the population of France than were killed in the First World War.
Britain, for most of these wars, faced a strategic difficulty in going on to the offensive through what has been called the ‘amphibious bottleneck’.29 The sea gave Britain two advantages. It acted as a defensive shield against invasion and allowed the transport of goods and military stores cheaply and quickly. But the dependence upon wind and weather also made it extremely difficult to transport by sea an army that was large enough to gain ground quickly and achieve an element of surprise. The large amount of tonnage required for shipping horses for cavalry and for hauling wagons for equipment and provisions made for an unwieldy fleet. Those expeditions with over 100,000 tons of transports, such as those to the West Indies in the 1790s and to Walcheren in 1809, proved to be failures, expensive in both lives and money. The complexities of administration and the vagaries of the weather resulted in long delays, and landings on enemy territory often took place at the wrong season of the year. Castlereagh as secretary of state for war tried to create a ‘disposable’ force to be kept ready for deployment when wanted, but to have forces in reserve was beyond the resources of the country. On the two occasions when speed and success were achieved on the Continent, at Copenhagen in 1807 and the landing by Wellesley’s army at Mondego Bay in Portugal in 1808, expedition preparations had already been made, the first by the foresight of Tom Grenville when first lord of the Admiralty, and the second by luck, for the army sent to Portugal had been intended for South America. Very large amphibious expeditions were beyond the administrative capacity of the country. France faced similar difficulties: even Napoleon flinched when his very large army was ready in 1804 and 1805 to invade England, and ultimately it was a risk that the arch-gambler was not prepared to take. Only when the great harbour at Lisbon, a city made safe from the enemy by the Torres Vedras Lines, was able to receive continuous supplies from transports did Britain have a bridgehead on the Continent firm enough to challenge Napoleon. Sending the British Army to the Peninsula in 1808 was politically very unpopular, exacerbated by early defeat and evacuation at Corunna in 1809. But Lisbon was successfully defended. Successive campaigns were fought against the weather and a tenacious French Army, with little quarter given. However, the populations of Spain and Portugal suffered terribly: by one recent estimate a million civilians died.30
The slow attrition of Napoleon’s forces in the Peninsula developed into a winning strategy. Wellington’s force of character and increasing success eventually gained political, then public, support. By his concentration on the defence of Portugal he gave the nation not only a string of victories but also a strategy for conducting the war on land; it was little wonder that decorations and rewards rained down on him. Even then, had Napoleon’s ambition not outrun his resources, the British effort might not have been enough. By the time he gathered his enormous invasion force during 1811, his available manpower had reached its limit, for he had to draw troops from other theatres to make up an army. It is striking that Napoleon’s fatal reverses occurred at the northern and southern extremes of Europe, in Russia and in the Peninsula, where campaigns were fought beyond the limits of his telegraph system. On the two occasions in 1807 when the British comprehensively outwitted the emperor, the capture of the Danish Fleet at Copenhagen and the evacuation of the Portuguese royal family and Fleet from Lisbon, the action occurred in places beyond his telegraphic reach.
As we have seen throughout the second part of this book, British ministers unsurprisingly suffered long periods of anxiety, particularly in the five years after the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807, when Napoleon was dominant in Europe. These years were less punctuated by adverse military setbacks than those of the first crisis period of 1795–8, but politically and financially they were more dangerous. Britain’s Continental allies collapsed in the face of Napoleon’s military prowess. The economic blockade proclaimed by Napoleon’s Berlin Decrees in November 1806 caused a severe downturn in British trade. In 1807 Napoleon started to build a fleet of what he hoped would become 150 battleships to overwhelm England by sheer force of numbers, using the combined shipbuilding resources drawn from his vanquished opponents all over Europe. The threat of invasion, supported by a new French battle fleet building in Antwerp, led to a continuous and costly year-round British naval blockade off the mouth of the Scheldt, which was maintained for over four years.
The prolonged struggle was not without major British errors: political rivalries and crises, flawed intelligence assessments, overambitious war plans and the appointment of individuals who were clearly not up to the job. William Windham springs most readily to mind, hopelessly ill-suited to the administrative burdens of the office of secretary at war in the 1790s, and, it was said, not often in the office. He blundered about as secretary of state for war in the Talents ministry for thirteen months in 1806 and 1807: anything he put his hand to was doomed to failure. The incompetent sons of George III constituted another millstone around the nation’s neck, with the honourable exception of the duke of York.*
Corruption and inefficiency in government persisted, but the humiliation and resignation of Lord Melville
in 1806 served as a watershed, after which the pace of government reform increased. Under the relentless pressure of a great war, the British government machine had to regenerate itself almost constantly and become more efficient. The parliamentary system itself, so despised by Napoleon, was critical to this improvement, though it was at times a bruising experience for those participating in it. Ancient customs and patronage were sacrificed and sinecures diminished as men of ability rose to the top. The two lengthy parliamentary commissions, of Naval Revision and of Military Enquiry, which reported between 1806 and 1812, exposed corruption in the navy and army, but more tellingly revealed lamentable administrative incompetence and extraordinary delays in financial accounting. Fortunately, the recommendations of the commissions were adopted quickly.31 Worn-out bureaucrats were retired, and new laws on superannuation were passed. The productivity of the state dockyards increased. Employees were paid promptly and labour disputes dwindled, a contrast with the French Revolutionary War. Technological improvements lessened costs. Relations between government officials and private contractors, governed by an increasingly sophisticated contract system, allowed government technicians and the officials who ran the Treasury, Army Commissariat and Ordnance, Navy, Transport and Victualling boards, together with the officers of the various state yards, to maintain and control quality.
Although contractors who make a profit out of war have never been popular either at the time or with historians, there were many benefits to the British government in this alliance between the state and commerce. Injections of capital and investment were much more easy and, when greater production was needed, as was demanded in the last five years of the war, the British economy surged at the height of what is generally known as the ‘Industrial Revolution’. Purchasing of commodities by particular merchants for government use, usually on a grand scale, could be conducted relatively anonymously to avoid price rises, and imported commodities could be transported in neutral ships without difficulty. International merchants operated with daily knowledge of their market, buying or manufacturing with expertise far beyond the capacity of government officials.
The British economy and workforce had to supply increasing quantities of munitions, uniforms and supplies not only for British forces, but for the armies of the countries of Continental Europe that were to rise up against Napoleon and finally defeat him. Austria, Prussia, Russia, Sweden, Spain and Portugal all received critical supplies and money, without which they would not, and indeed could not, have taken up the fight against the French.32 British manufacturers, shipbuilders, cannon-founders, gunsmiths and City financiers expanded production and distribution far beyond the capacity of the state’s dockyards, victualling yards, and munitions and gunpowder factories. The owners of merchant ships chartered their vessels to government, so enabling distant parts of the world to be supplied, and troops to be transported in large numbers for amphibious expeditions. Agricultural contractors of every sort – from farmers, market gardeners, drovers, graziers, cattle and grain merchants to agents and wheat importers – achieved ever-increasing production and supply to fleet and army. All these efforts were possible because of what was, excepting a downturn in 1811 and early 1812, a dynamic, innovative and advanced economy.
Some have described these wars as ‘total’, judging their intensity, cruelty and scale as ‘apocalyptic’.33 Others regard them more soberly, seeing them rather in terms of the dynastic wars of the eighteenth century.34 There is no doubt that the wars against France can be described as ‘total’ in the sense that they were a lengthy contest between two contrasting industrial economies and political systems. The use of wholesale commercial blockades as a central weapon of war prefigured their use in the twentieth century, and had long-term effect: twenty years of the British blockade of once prosperous south-west France left that region in a state of poverty from which it arguably did not recover until the second half of the twentieth century.35 Britain escaped the ravages of occupation, and its economy was strengthened. Although the national debt was at extraordinarily high levels by 1815, manufacturing and extractive industries such as coal, iron and copper had been stimulated, shipyards were busy, agricultural prices were high and production developed, markets abroad had opened up, and trade had been maintained as a consequence of British control of the seas. The wars with France were as much conflicts between economies and their industrial capacities as were the twentieth-century wars with Germany that followed.36
The strategy of defensive containment led, almost by definition, to a long war. Of all the countries hostile to Napoleon, Britain alone fought France and its allies for the full twenty-two years, pausing only during the Peace of Amiens. The major problem, therefore, was the question of national stamina. Could Britain hold out, year after year, against a much more powerful enemy? This was why this period was the most dangerous for Britain. The financial strain in maintaining the war effort, both for the country and its allies, was almost intolerable.37 But Spencer Perceval’s government managed to continue to finance the army in the Peninsula, an all but unrecognized achievement. Perceval was a hardened politician, courageous and honest, who kept his nerve and led a fragile government at the most difficult of times. And at the time, as even the prince regent realized, there seemed no one else who could command a majority in parliament. Cut down by an assassin, Perceval has not received the credit for what he achieved, for he brought the country through a crisis every bit as menacing as that faced by William Pitt, and was famously described by Canning as ‘The Pilot Who Weathered the Storm’, and is still remembered as such today.38
At the centre of the British national effort was parliament. For all its faults, delays and doubts about costs and strategy, it was a better system of waging war than anything that could be mustered by a dictator, although, on the face of it, this would hardly seem to be the case. Between 1799 and 1812, from the years of Napoleon’s rise to supreme power in France as first consul to his defeat in Russia, there were six British prime ministers, ten foreign secretaries, seven secretaries of state for war and nine first lords of the Admiralty.39 But, while Napoleon had the advantages of continuity and speed of decision, he eventually lost a sense of reality. By about 1810 his ministers were telling him only what he wanted to hear. Just at the moment when the British government administration was jolted out of old ways, by getting up-to-date and complete information to parliament so that estimates and policy could be fully formulated and understood, Napoleon disappeared behind a cloud of illusion, ordering ships to be built by men whom he had sent to the army, to be paid for by an income that was disappearing as his control over his vassal states loosened and the Continental System disintegrated.
The British system certainly put great strain on both politicians and government servants. Parliamentary debates in this period of instability were often intense and language violent. The duel between Canning and Castlereagh in 1809 and the assassination of Spencer Perceval in 1812 were the most dramatic moments in a period fraught with drama. Aristocratic ministers, unused to the long hours of administration and opposition in the House, were particularly vulnerable to stress and fatigue, and regular visits for recuperation were made to spa towns such as Bath and Tunbridge Wells. Frequent changes of administration and vituperative debate resulted in tired and inept senior politicians. As war ministers only Pitt, Dundas, Canning, Castlereagh, Perceval and Liverpool passed muster. Among the incompetent must be counted the aged Portland, while none of the Whigs, especially Fox, Windham and Grenville in his later years, rose to the challenge. It was the younger politicians serving as secretaries and officials in the departments under them who provided continuity and strength. The contributions of Huskisson and Herries to managing state finances, of Harrison to the working of the Treasury, of Calvert, Palmerston and Bunbury to the reform the army, of Croker and Barrow to the efficiency of the navy, stand out among many, but certain things were common to all these men: youth, intelligence and formidable industry.
And then there were
the twists and turns of the war itself, of which there are many examples that will be known to readers of this book, but that are outside of its immediate scope. Two, however, should be mentioned here. The most unexpected advantage came to Britain by the rising of the people of Madrid against French domination in May 1808, for it solved Britain’s strategic problem of getting an army on to the Continent. The army that was sent at short notice was ready at Cork to go to South America, but instead landed in Portugal. It is sobering to reflect that, if this uprising had occurred a few weeks later, that expedition would have departed, and its commander, Arthur Wellesley, might very well have gone on to a relatively obscure career. Then there is the final gamble of Napoleon’s escape from Elba. Had the British cabinet lost patience and refused to pay any more subsidies to its Continental allies, Napoleon might not have been defeated. After all the treaties and negotiations that had brought a kind of closure at Vienna, Britain might have withdrawn from Europe.40 But the only time that an isolationist mood came over the British government was during the Ministry of All the Talents between 1806 and 1807, when Britain abandoned its central European allies. The combination of Grenville’s economic caution and Fox’s muddle-headed approaches to Napoleon led to a strategic vacuum, and a series of misguided overseas adventures, the purposes of which could only be that the ministry wished to be seen to be doing something. The subsequent Tory governments were both more determined and more clear-sighted, and parliament backed them, voting the necessary funds to continue the struggle.41