by Max Adams
Among the elite Corsican families who decided to assimilate themselves under French rule were the Buonapartes of Ajaccio (pronounced Azhaksio in the Corsican dialect). Carlo Buonaparte was one of Paoli’s secretaries, a loyal resistance leader. After Paoli’s departure he read law at Pisa and returned to become the legal assessor for his home town. Here, in the year of the rebel defeat at Ponte-Nuovo in 1769, his son Napoleone was born. As a teenager Napoleone took advantage of a French initiative to integrate Corsica with the mainland: he was given a scholarship to study artillery at the École Militaire in Paris. Ironically, his choice to specialise in gunnery was the result of a desire to join the navy. He later tried to shed his provinciality by changing his name to the French: Napoleon Bonaparte.
The revolution of 1789 gave Paoli (now in his sixties) the chance to return to Corsica, where he once more resumed military and political control of the island. But as the ideological fervour of the revolution turned to terror, Paoli again became the enemy of the French. Napoleon, now an ideologically committed revolutionary, also returned to the island, waged his first, unsuccessful military campaign against Sardinia, and tried to heal the rift between Paoli and the Convention. Unsuccessful, he decided to evacuate his family to the mainland. They arrived in Toulon in 1793, just in time for Napoleon to achieve fame in the siege of that city by the British.
It was largely as a result of the failure at Toulon that Admiral Hood, recognising the need for an alternative base in the western Mediterranean, decided to embark on the invasion of Corsica which led to the formation of the Anglo-Corsican kingdom. Who made the first move is not entirely clear. Certainly Paoli sought protection from Hood, who determined to attack and destroy the strong French garrisons at Bastia, Calvi and St Florent. Various abortive attempts were made to land forces in the north of the island: Paoli’s reports of French military weaknesses turned out to be over-optimistic. Paoli was using the British at least as much as they were exploiting him. Of the debacle at Toulon he wrote: ‘the capture of Toulon is fortunate. It obliges the English to liberate us.’4
The ‘liberator’ of Corsica was Horatio Nelson who, impatient with Hood’s cautious approach, took it upon himself to pound first Bastia and then Calvi (in June 1794) into submission, when perhaps blockade might have been less costly. At Calvi not only did Nelson lose an eye; the amphibious force lost two-thirds of its men to malaria and dysentery. Among Nelson’s losses was Lieutenant James Moutray, Mary Moutray’s son, to whom Nelson erected a stone at the ‘Cathedral of the Nebbio’ in St Florent.5 Nelson, in reporting the boy’s death to his friend, wrote to Collingwood that he had hardly ever known so amiable a young man.6 In the same letter Nelson welcomed Collingwood back to the Mediterranean:
My dear Coll, I cannot allow a Ship to leave me without a line for my old friend, who I shall rejoice to see; but I am afraid the Admiral will not give me that pleasure at present. You are so old a Mediterranean man, that I can tell you nothing new about the Country. My command here is so far pleasant as it relieves me from the inactivity of our fleet, which is great indeed, as you will soon see.7
Nelson was blockading Tuscan ports. The admiral in question, Sir Charles Hotham (Hood having retired), engaged the French in desultory fashion in two inconclusive actions, and was half-sympathetically blamed for them by his colleagues. He was witheringly described by Sir Gilbert Elliot as ‘a piece of perfectly inert formality’.8 By August 1795 Collingwood was in Leghorn (Livorno), having delivered his convoy to St Florent (San Fiorenzo in the Corsican dialect). St Florent is a small fishing port in northern Corsica, separated from its much larger neighbour Bastia by Cap Corse and the high pass at Col de Teghime. Here Collingwood had arrived on the 23rd. He had previously been acquainted with the island in his days as a midshipman in the Gibraltar, during Paoli’s first period in power. During that visit he seems to have been traumatised by the stabbing of three of his shipmates, for he referred to the episode in a letter to Sir Edward Blackett. He had retained a deep prejudice against the island:9
They have no idea of restraint by laws, or making an appeal to them when injured, the blood of the offender can alone appease them; they are always armed, even when they go to church. Such is our new kingdom.10
The Anglo-Corsican kingdom was doomed from the day of its inception. Having lost America to republicanism, Britain had no intention of making what it saw as the same mistake in Corsica. So instead of allowing Paoli to get on with running an island that many, Collingwood prominent among them, thought ungovernable and not worth the effort, they imposed a viceroy on him: Sir Gilbert Elliot. Elliot and Paoli squabbled from the outset. Neither trusted the other, with reason, and there was deep resentment at the British military presence, fomented with relish by large numbers of infiltrators sent from France. As was the case in Menorca, there was enormous local resentment at being controlled by heretics, as the Catholic population saw them.
Britain, suspecting from intelligence sources that Spain would soon enter the war on the side of France, could not afford to lose the island as a source of timber and other supplies, and as a base for its Toulon blockade. To make matters worse, France was about to send its new military hero Bonaparte on a campaign into Italy that would not just alter the balance of power on the continent, but would also revolutionise warfare. He would push his armies farther and faster than any before him since Alexander and Caesar. As Collingwood observed:
Is it not wonderful that this young man Bonaparte, without that experience which has been thought necessary to the command of great armies, is able to defeat all the schemes and armies that the best Austrian officers can present to him?11
No doubt this was partly a comment on the capabilities of the Austrian military machine; but it shows also how closely Collingwood kept in touch with events that others might have thought too remote to be of interest. Meanwhile, Collingwood spent much of the winter of 1795–6 in Corsica, to his dismay. Excellent, which otherwise he found true to her name, had been struck by the Princess Royal in the middle of a dark and rainy night while on blockade, and been forced into Ajaccio for a new foremast and bowsprit. Collingwood’s opinion of Corsicans had not improved (not helped by having been forty-eight hours on deck when he wrote the following):
This part of Corsica is still more barbarous than San Fiorenzo: the least offence offered to one of the inhabitants is resented by a stab, or a shot from behind a wall. Yesterday one of them stabbed another in the public square, and walked away, wiping his dagger, while no one attempted to stop him, or seemed to think it a violent measure, concluding, I suppose, that he had a good reason for what he did. Some bad carpenters were discharged from the yard on Saturday, because they were not wanted, and on Sunday morning they took a shot at Commissioner Coffin, as he walked in his garden, but missed him.12
Paoli he thought something of a fraud. The island was too expensive to maintain, and too much trouble. In any case it soon proved impossible to keep it in the face of French successes. By the end of 1796 the Royal Navy was driven from Corsica and the Mediterranean. Much of this was due to Bonaparte’s campaign against the Austrians in Italy. Neither Naples nor Austria could now be counted on for support (and both believed Britain had failed them when they needed her). The Italian peninsula was being devastated, as Collingwood told Sarah’s uncle Sir Edward Blackett:
The French, puffed with the victories of their armies, and having in view some indemnification to their exhausted finances by the plunder of those countries they overrun, shew no disposition to peace. In Italy they have collected immense sums of gold and silver, and do not confine their plunder to specie, but every monument of art and magnificence which has rendered a country respectable and is moveable, they carry off. Their army is a band of robbers, acting under a most horrible tyranny which it is melancholy to see has stretched its injustice over so great a part of Europe. To be their friend or foe is equally ruinous.13
This might have been a prophetic warning to Spain. It shows again how closely Collingwood o
bserved events outside his own personal experience. What he could see with his own eyes was that Britain did not have a coherent plan for abandoning Corsica. The French, growing in economic and military confidence, were poised to retake the island. Back in London the government had, during the winter of 1795–6, already formed the view that Britain would be forced out of the Mediterranean.14 With all continental ports closed to her, and no likelihood of the French fleet being tempted out of Toulon, she had effectively been defeated without being brought to battle. Even so, withdrawal would not be easy. Indeed, such was the depressed view of the situation in London, that in October 1796 Pitt sent diplomatic signals to Paris with the aim of suing for peace.
In the ports of Corsica the navy at any rate was on the alert. Paoli had gone into exile in London once more, and the British were regarded with as much animosity as the French.15 All stores were now kept on board to prevent theft or destruction by the local population and by French infiltrators. Time was running out. Leghorn had been seized by Napoleon. In August 1796 Spain signed a treaty with France. By the autumn Nelson was with a squadron at Bastia, while Collingwood was with the newly arrived Sir John Jervis and his squadron at St Florent. Nelson tried to cross the pass to reach them on foot, but the road was already held by hostile forces. On 19 October Nelson evacuated Bastia in the dead of night but was boxed in by a gale while the garrison tried furiously to un-spike the guns of the citadel.16 St Florent was under threat too. Jervis warned the town he would destroy it if its guns fired on his ships. Collingwood and others were instructed to blow up the tower called La Mortella that guarded the entrance to the bay: their success can still be seen in the almost exact half of the tower which survives. Oddly, that tower’s effectiveness persuaded the Duke of York, some years later, to build the famous string of misnamed ‘Martello’ Towers along the south coast of England that, perhaps as much as the Channel fleet, dissuaded Napoleon from his long-nurtured plan of invasion.
Eventually both British squadrons got away, narrowly missing a Spanish interception force in the night. A relief squadron under Admiral Man never arrived, his conduct a matter of speculation among his fellow officers, as Nelson noted in a chatty letter to Collingwood sent from Bastia to St Florent by sea:
My Dear Coll,
Thanks for your newspapers which were a very great treat … (P.S.) we have reports that Man is gone through the Gut [Strait of Gibraltar] – not to desert us I hope, but I have my suspicions.17
What had happened was that Man had arrived on station with no provisions, and had been sent back to Gibraltar by Jervis. There he had encountered the Spanish fleet, and decided to return to England.18 How he escaped Byng’s fate is a mystery. So Jervis, Collingwood, Nelson and the other captains of the Mediterranean fleet sailed west through the Strait of Gibraltar at the end of 1796, expecting not to return. And there was worse news from home. The French had attempted to invade Ireland. On 16 December fifteen thousand troops and with them the Irish rebel leader Wolfe Tone, set sail from Brest, aiming to land in Bantry Bay. The invasion was foiled by a brilliant spoiling operation on the part of the frigate captain Sir Edward Pellew, ably assisted by terrible winter weather. Pellew had sailed his ship Indefatigable among the French fleet at night, firing signal guns, rockets and blue lights. The resulting confusion saw the fleet in hopeless disarray the following morning.19 Nevertheless, it was a stark warning to Britain, and caused something close to panic. There had already been bread riots in England, and in October the King’s carriage was stoned by a crowd demanding peace and food. In Newcastle, two banks closed their doors.
A victory was required. France had not given up her plan of an Irish invasion, hoping that a French-sponsored rebellion there would spread to England, or at least allow the Channel to be blockaded. Orders were issued to bring the French and Spanish fleets together at Brest, take them to Holland, and there embark another invasion force.20 Jervis, stationed with his depleted fleet at Lisbon, received intelligence of the plan. Collingwood wrote to Sir Edward Blackett in January, believing the navy was in no sort of shape to meet them:
We have had but a lamentable winter. Political events have gone very much against us … But the elements, the dreadful and almost constant gales of wind, have done us infinitely more harm, and reduced our little fleet to the strength of a cruizing squadron.21
In fact, Jervis’ fleet was down to fifteen sail of the line. But Jervis, a massive, hunch-shouldered bullish old man unhindered by self-doubt or intellectual contemplation, hard as nails and spoiling for a fight, was no Byng or Hotham or Man – nor yet Howe. He expected to take on and beat any enemy, regardless of numerical inferiority. He also had an appalling sense of humour, almost cruel. He was celebrated for having called the fleet’s chaplains over to his flagship in the middle of a terrible gale, only to dismiss them again. He did a similar thing to a furious Collingwood for the sake of two bags of onions.22 His temper was legendary. But under his martial fire, the fleet was transformed.
Since taking command the previous year, Jervis had drilled his fleet to perfection. Their gunnery and manoeuvring in and out of line were practised day after day, to the admiration of Collingwood, Nelson and other enthusiastic captains: Troubridge, Dacres, Foley, Miller, Saumarez and Admirals Waldegrave and Parker. Nelson later called them his Band of Brothers. They were the navy’s elite. This was the period when Collingwood trained the crew of the Excellent to such a pitch that it was said they could fire an extraordinary three broadsides in three-and-a-half minutes.23 It would never be bettered; and it would prove devastating to the enemy.
In February 1797 the fleet was cruising off Cape St Vincent, the extreme south-west tip of Portugal, hoping to intercept the Spanish fleet’s passage north. Jervis visited each ship in turn, scrutinising their preparations. His aide-de-camp was a young midshipman called Parsons, who noted that ‘the men and officers seemed to look taller, and the anticipation of victory was legibly written on each brow’.24 One morning Jervis took Parsons with him on a visit to Excellent. Parsons, inured to these visits, was persuaded by one of Collingwood’s mid’s to join him below for a surreptitious lunch of beef and dumplings:
When all at once I heard, ‘Pass the word for the Vice-Admiral’s midshipman; his admiral and captain are towing alongside, waiting for him.’ This alarming information nearly caused me to choke by endeavouring to swallow a large piece of pudding I had in my mouth, and with my cocked hat placed on my head the wrong way, I crossed the hawse of Captain Collingwood, who, calling me a young scamp, and some other hard names, which I have long since forgiven, assured me, in not a very friendly tone, that if I was his midshipman, he would treat me with a dozen by marrying me to the gunner’s daughter.25
Collingwood was rather more indulgent towards his men than his (or another captain’s) midshipmen. His view was that young gentlemen wishing to be officers must set a higher standard of behaviour than common seamen, and that thrashing them occasionally to remind them of their duty (or disrating them, as he had done to Jeffrey Raigersfeld) would do them no harm. No doubt it also earned him kudos on the lower decks.
On the morning of 14 February, St Valentine’s Day, 1797 the first ships of the Spanish fleet were sighted through slowly dispersing fog. Nelson (now flying a commodore’s pennant), catching up with the fleet in Captain the previous day, had spotted them. As the morning wore on it was obvious that Jervis was heavily outnumbered, by twenty-seven ships to fifteen; the Spanish ships were bigger too. One of them was the vast four-decker flagship Santissima Trinidada of 130 guns. Collingwood noted that the Spanish bore nearly twice as many guns as the British fleet. It mattered little to Jervis. He had issued a strict series of orders to his captains and admirals, very much preferring obedience to disobedience. As they bore down on the Spanish they kept as perfect a line as any of them had seen, but it was implicit in Jervis’ command that he also preferred enterprise to shyness. Not for him another First of June.
The Spanish fleet was strung out ahead in a straggli
ng line, heading south-east towards Cadiz rather than northwards. The wind was almost directly behind them. Jervis, seeing a gap in their line, immediately steered for it, hoping to cut off a group of enemy ships to leeward in the manner which Nelson would use later at Trafalgar. Don Cordova, the Spanish admiral, issued orders for his ships to wear and head north, so that they might keep to windward of the British and retain the all-important weather-gage. His detached ships would have to catch up as best they could. Now Jervis had to deal with twenty-one enemy ships of the line instead of twenty-seven.
The two fleets began to pass each other on parallel, but opposite courses: Cordova to the north, Jervis to the south. The Spanish line was ill-formed and encumbered by the inexperience of its crews. The British line was like taut elastic. Now Jervis signalled to his van, led by Troubridge in Culloden, to tack in succession. This would bring Culloden smashing into the rear ships of the Spanish line. But Jervis had given his order some minutes too late. By the time the last ships in the line had tacked in succession, the van of the Spanish fleet would have passed out of range to the north. There they might turn south and envelop the British rear. Seeing this, Nelson, two ships from the rear in Captain, decided (if decision is the right word for a man who acted almost before thought in battle) to wear out of line and head straight for the ships of the Spanish van. Collingwood, at the rear in Excellent, quickly saw what his friend was about, and followed him close behind.
That evening, talking over the events of that tumultuous day:
Captain Calder hinted that the spontaneous manoeuvre which carried those duo fulmina belli26 Nelson and Collingwood, into the brunt of battle, was an unauthorised departure by the Commodore from the prescribed mode of attack! ‘It certainly was so,’ replied Sir John Jervis, ‘and if ever you commit such a breach of your orders, I will forgive you also.’27