Beware of Heroes: Admiral Sir Sidney Smith's War against Napoleon

by Peter Shankland

  Another criticism was that he had failed to secure the co-operation of their Spanish allies that might have completed the destruction of the French fleet. It was, of course, Admiral Hood’s business to secure their co-operation. Robespierre claimed afterwards that one of his agents had persuaded the Spanish Admiral Langara not to co-operate. Eighteen months later Nelson wrote:

  We have just got accounts that the French fleet is at sea, twenty-two sail of the line. Sir Sidney did not burn them all — Lord Hood mistook his man: there is an old song, ‘Great talkers do the least, we see.’

  In fact Sir Sidney never claimed to have burned them all, and in any case there had been time for rebuilding and repairs.

  In command of the Diamond, frigate, operating off the coasts of Normandy and Brittany, Sir Sidney soon added to his reputation. With other daring captains he was employed in intercepting French coastal shipping, putting agents ashore, picking up Royalist fugitives and landing supplies for the Chouans — the partisans who were warring against the central government. His principal contact in France was General Louis de Frotté who commanded the Royalists in La Vendée.

  Once, with the Diamond disguised and flying the tricolour, he sailed into the harbour at Brest to see what ships were there. On his way out he had to pass close to an enemy ship of the line that had entered and was barring his way. Observing that she had sustained storm damage, he sailed boldly up to her and in perfect French asked the captain if he was in need of assistance. After a friendly chat, in the course of which he was given the latest news of the French fleet, he made for the open sea. Among other exploits he chased and drove on to the rocks the twenty-two gun ship Assemblée Nationale, captured the Islands of St. Marcou lying close to the French coast; and in the spring of 1796 he burnt nine ships in the harbour of Herqui while his landing parties captured the shore batteries, spiked the guns and came away with the French colours.

  On 18th April, 1796, he located off Le Havre the French privateer Le Vengeur, the only enemy vessel that still menaced British shipping within the area of his command. The water was not deep enough for the Diamond to get within range of her, so he decided to cut her out.

  He had with him on board a French gentleman, Monsieur de Tromelin. He was only twenty-five, but he had served under the old regime as a lieutenant in the Limousan Regiment (42nd Infantry); then he had emigrated to England and taken part in the landing at Quiberon in 1795. He escaped the massacre of the 700 Royalists who had surrendered after the failure of that enterprise and paused, at Caen, in his flight to England only long enough to get married. In London he supported himself by giving drawing lessons, and then he was employed on special missions to France. He was now acting as a courier between the Royalist government in exile and General Frotté, so he really had nothing to do with the operation against Le Vengeur, but when Sir Sidney asked him if he would like to take part in the cutting-out expedition, which he was leading himself ‘because he was the best swordsman’, honour demanded that the only Frenchman on board should share his danger.

  When night fell, conditions were favourable. The moon was obscured and there was a light on-shore wind. Four of the ship’s boats and a Thames wherry were manned by volunteers, and they rowed towards Le Vengeur with muffled oars. Nine of the volunteers were officers of whom six were between the ages of twelve and sixteen. Their presence was not discovered until they were within half a pistol shot of their quarry. Ten minutes later they had boarded and captured her — but during the scuffle one of the Frenchmen had cut her cable, and the tide swept her up the River Seine. They sent their prisoners below, put guns on the hatches, and set every sail — but the wind had fallen right away. The only anchor they could find on board was a light kedge which dragged a long way before it held.

  When day broke the French coastguards saw four ship’s boats towing the long low hull of their privateer towards the sea. The alarm was given and the batteries manned. A corvette, armed luggers, and longboats full of troops put off to rescue her. Seeing that an engagement was imminent, Sir Sidney released his prisoners on parole and put them ashore at Honfleur.

  The first attack was beaten off, but as more and more craft came out from Le Havre, the British seamen were soon heavily outnumbered and surrounded. When one of his men had been killed and several wounded, and further resistance would have been a useless sacrifice of life, Sir Sidney surrendered to Captain Le Loup who commanded the corvette. The engagement had lasted for three-quarters of an hour.

  If de Tromelin had been recognised it was certain that he would have been shot. Sir Sidney called his men together and told them: ‘Monsieur de Tromelin will pass as my servant. His name is John Bromley.’ When the French officers boarded the vessel, John Bromley was busy packing his master’s portmanteau.

  There was great excitement ashore when it became known that the redoubtable ‘Commodore’ Smith had been captured. The crowd, when the prisoners were landed, was not hostile. There were cheerful shouts of ‘Vive la Republique!’ to which the ‘Commodore’ replied with cheerful salutations. The crew were sent to Rouen as prisoners of war, but Sir Sidney, his servant John Bromley and his secretary, Midshipman John Wesley Wright, were taken to Paris and lodged in the Abbaye Prison.

  The following letter from the authorities at Le Havre was printed in the Moniteur, the government sponsored newspaper:

  At last we hold Sidney Smith, that British incendiary who burned our ships at Toulon, the same who attempted, some time ago, to set fire to the buildings and stores of Havre; he who, in a word, has promised Pitt to make of all our harbours and shipping only a heap of cinders...His intention to spread flames here is undoubted, because a sulphur match was found with him, similar to those which were discovered some months ago under one of the frigates under construction. We warn you that, not having at Havre a place strong enough to hold him, we are sending him off to Rouen under good and sure escort to await until National justice gives its verdict on all the attempts of this monster.

  And the Moniteur added:

  We learn that the Directory has just given orders for him to be taken to Paris as an incendiary.

  After six weeks in the Abbaye Prison Sir Sidney was transferred with Bromley and Wright to the Temple Prison which was looked upon as the ante-room to the guillotine. He was denied the rights of a prisoner of war and charged, under an Act of Accusation signed by Barras, with an incendiary attempt on the town and port of Havre de Grace.

  There was an agreement in force for the exchange of naval officers who had become prisoners of war. As soon as the Admiralty learned of Sidney Smith’s capture they released a French officer of comparative rank, Captain Bergeret, who had lately commanded the frigate Virginie, and sent him to France on parole to effect the exchange: the Directory refused to release their prisoner, so Captain Bergeret returned to England and captivity.

  Chapter Two – The Prophecy

  The Temple Prison was a gloomy fortress built in the year 1222 as the Paris headquarters of the Knights Templars. It consisted of a keep with four large round towers and two smaller ones. It was the most notorious prison of the Revolution, a smaller but more sinister Bastille. It had served as a prison for Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette before they were guillotined, and in it had died, mysteriously, the young Bourbon prince, Louis XVII, aged twelve, after the execution of his parents.

  Sir Sidney and Wright were taken up a long winding stairway, through a succession of iron doors, and thrust into separate rooms — the Directory had ordered that they were to be held in solitary confinement, au secret, as it was called. Against this treatment they protested in vain. They were interrogated separately by the police, and never allowed to meet although they were lodged in the same tower. Sir Sidney’s room, which had once been occupied by the royal family, had walls of stone, a paved floor and small deeply recessed windows protected by iron grilles. Above him were vaguely-sensed chambers whose occupants he never saw; below him were the political prisoners and, lower still, the criminals.


  He spent much of his time pacing from one corner of his room to the corner opposite and back again. The principal sounds that reached him were the clanging of iron doors, the jingling of keys and the rasping of iron bolts. The prison was surrounded by an open courtyard, constantly patrolled, and by a high stone wall. Once a day the courtyard was cleared of the other prisoners who exercised there, and he was permitted to walk in it attended by a soldier with loaded musket. Escape seemed impossible. Only his servant, John Bromley, was allowed to attend him.

  One evening they noticed a bright light in the upper window of a house outside the prison wall. Shadows passed and re-passed. They watched attentively. The light went out. Then a white sheet or screen became visible, so placed within the room that it could be seen only from the highest windows of the Temple. Large letters were projected on to it from a magic lantern, spelling out the message: ‘Qui êtes vous?’ Then the alphabet began, one letter regularly following the other. When ‘S’ appeared, Sir Sidney waved his hand through the grille. The series of letters stopped. Then it began again from the beginning. This time he stopped it at ‘I’. Thus he slowly spelt out his name, and added, ‘We want money. Ask Revel.’ He was alluding to the Chevalier de Revel who had commanded the Sardinian contingent at Toulon. He was now Sardinian Ambassador to London, and Sir Sidney believed that he was visiting Paris.

  Next day they saw three women smiling at the window. Not knowing their names, they christened them after three of the muses, Thalia, Clio and Melpomene. About a week later the prison doctor came to examine the inmates; while he was taking Sir Sidney’s pulse he slipped a rouleau of gold coins into his hand.

  Greatly encouraged by this successful contact with some underground organisation, John Bromley now took the grave risk of entrusting his real name to the muses and asking them to contact his wife. Not many days had passed before he had the inexpressible joy of seeing her at their window. By this time he had become popular with the gaoler and turnkeys. His devotion to his master in spite of the rough treatment he sometimes received, his laughable attempts to learn French and, most of all, his sentimental attachment to the pretty daughter of one of the warders, gained everyone’s sympathy.

  The gaoler allowed him to go out sometimes to execute small commissions — and so he met his wife again after their long separation. He might have disappeared in the crowd and got away, but both he and she agreed that he could not abandon his companions in misfortune, Secret Police haunted the vicinity of the Temple. In order to furnish a pretext for their frequent meetings, which must have been observed, she handed her husband, every time they met, a letter she had addressed under an assumed name to Sir Sidney; and he let it be known that this lady was desperately in love with ‘the Commodore’ and was employing him as a go-between. Thus Sir Sidney received many of her passionate love letters, and treasured them.

  He also received messages from General Frotté written from his secret headquarters deep in the forest of Halouze, assuring him that all the resources of the partisans would be at his disposal, and that faithful friends were working on plans for his escape. Chief among these was Count Phélippeaux who had been a lieutenant-general in Condé’s army: he had led the unsuccessful insurrection at Sancerre, the operation known as ‘the war of the little Vendée’. After being defeated and captured he was rescued from prison at Bourges on the eve of the day appointed for his execution. Now he had come to Paris, with the two friends who had rescued him, in order to plan the escape of three Royalist agents who were also imprisoned in the Temple.

  One of these friends, Boisgirard, had secured an engagement as a dancer in the Paris Opera as cover from the Secret Police. The other, Hyde de Neuville, was a descendant of the great Earl of Clarendon; his father had fled to France after Culloden and settled in the small town of Sancerre. He had assumed the name of Charles Loiseau, because his own was too well known to the police: before getting involved in the War of the Little Vendé he had been a member of the Jeunesse Group that attacked and forced the closure of the Jacobin Club where so many bloodthirsty measures had been determined upon. On the anniversary of the king’s execution he had caused a sensation by hoisting a large black flag on the belfry of the Madeleine Church where the body had been buried. On the 13th Vendémiaire he had been at the receiving end of Bonaparte’s cannon in the riots directed against the unpopular government of the Directory.

  With the approval of the Royalist commander for the area, the Comte de Rochecotte, it was agreed that Sir Sidney and Wright were to be included in the escape plan. The first attempt was managed by Charles Loiseau. He took an apartment close to the Temple, installed an attractive girl in it to excuse his frequent visits, and from the cellar under it he began tunnelling while a little girl of seven marched up and down outside beating a toy drum to drown the sound of his pick. Finding the job too much for him he asked a stone-mason to help him, and the man agreed, stipulating only that if he was arrested his wife and children should be provided for. After working for many days they succeeded in driving a tunnel under the prison wall, but they had miscalculated the depth and a paving stone suddenly fell in right at the feet of a sentry in broad daylight. By the time the guards had rushed out of the gates, and round the wall, and located the apartment and broken into it, the conspirators had fled and they found only some old clothes, a trunk full of firewood, and a toy drum.

  Sir Sidney was now even more closely watched. The gaoler, Lasne, was replaced by an ardent Jacobin, Boniface. Plan after plan was proposed through the Muses’ signal station and through Madame de Tromelin, only to be discarded as impracticable. Once there was a slender hope that he would be exchanged: the Admiralty offered 1,000 French prisoners for him, the Directory demanded 4,000. He wrote to London offering to capture them all back in a week if he could get to sea again, but the Admiralty were sceptical. They turned down the offer and took no further interest. One of the lords of the Admiralty, Rear-admiral Sir William Young, publicly blamed Sir Sidney’s ‘imprudence’. ‘A good preparation for abandoning a man’, William Windham commented in his diary.

  The British Commissioner for the Exchange of Prisoners, Henry Swinburne, advised against holding up the exchange of other prisoners as a protest. Two of the Muses used to call at his house in Paris; he would never receive them, anxious not to be involved. They brought him letters from Sir Sidney hidden in walnut shells, and he gave them money to smuggle into the prison. Once he visited them in the Rue de la Corderie outside the Temple, ‘up four flights of stairs, in a house looking into the shambles and market of the Abbaie St. Germaine’. The Muses, the three daughters of Madame Launey, seemed to him a sordid enough family: ‘There was an old hag rocking a child,’ he wrote, ‘and the two women undressed, unpainted and filthy looking. One of them is the divorced wife of some avocat de Provence.’ Obviously the Commissioner found the whole business of Sir Sidney Smith an embarrassment. Only the great-hearted Edmund Burke raised his voice on behalf of the prisoner, bitterly upbraiding the government for neglecting to take any steps for securing his release.

  On 1st February, 1797, when he had been living for more than nine months under the constant threat of being executed ‘as an enemy of the people’, he was transferred from the jurisdiction of the Minister of Justice to that of the Minister of Marine. The latter came to see him in the Temple. In the course of their conversation Sir Sidney stumped him by asking for a definition of Liberty. ‘I’m not surprised that you can’t define it,’ he continued, ‘but I, who drew in the conception of liberty with my mother’s milk, have no difficulty in doing so — it is the absence of constraint.’ The Minister agreed that if he cared to put it that way he was right, of course. No absence of constraint resulted from this interview, the conditions of his imprisonment were unchanged, but he succeeded in having John Bromley included in the list of prisoners who were to be sent home; he had constantly refused to take advantage of his greater freedom to escape.

  Five more months passed, and then Brigadier Dumaltera and a gendarm
e came to the prison bearing a decree from the Directory ordering that ‘John Bromley, servant of Sir Sidney Smith, should be removed from the Temple, to be conducted from brigade to brigade to the port of Dunkirk, and from there across to England.’ He protested that he wouldn’t go, and he was only reconciled to the idea by the argument that he would be of more use to Sir Sidney and to their Common cause outside of the Temple than within it. The warder’s pretty daughter bade him a tearful farewell, and his master gave him some money and a certificate of satisfactory service. Then Monsieur de Tromelin, an outlaw and virtually under sentence of death, was conducted out of the country under the protection of the gendarmes. He embarked at Dunkirk on 22nd July, and two days later he was in England. In due course Sir Sidney received a letter from his father mentioning that John Bromley had been to see him and his mother. They had paid him eighteen months’ wages, and he was visiting his other friends. His mother sent him a tender letter, full of longing to see him again:

  I have been constantly assured you would, of course, be as well treated as French officers taken by us have constantly experienced, and well I know your brotherly kindness to all who have ever depended on you for comfort...

  Her consoling words got no farther than the files of the Secret Police.

  After another four months the decree of solitary confinement was modified to allow Sir Sidney and Wright to meet. No explanation was offered for the severity with which Wright was treated; he had been in solitary confinement for eighteen months although there were no charges against him. He was there only because Sir Sidney had chosen him when he was told that he could take one companion with him, and there was no pretence that he was in any way different from the other prisoners of war.

  Boniface had gradually changed his attitude towards the prisoners and become more friendly. One day when there was a riot in the town and the guards had mutinied he called them down and told them, while blows thundered on the door, that the crowd was trying to break in to release the criminals, and that if they succeeded both he and the state prisoners would be massacred. He gave them loaded pistols, took one himself, and they prepared to sell their lives as dearly as possible. Fortunately the stout old doors held firm until help arrived and the crowd was dispersed.