Admiral Collingwood

by Max Adams

  at last discovered him with his gardener, Old Scott, to whom he was much attached, in the bottom of a deep trench, which they were busily occupied in digging.4

  When the weather was hot, the family went to bathe at Newbiggin on the coast north of Newcastle. On those days when low clouds scud across Northumberland from the north-west bringing cool air from the Cheviot hills, Collingwood went for long walks with Bounce and a pocket full of acorns.5 When it rained, he read history or made drawings: three in his hand survive from this period, of Sarah and the girls – though unfortunately not of Bounce.

  Somehow, between these pursuits and an endless round of visits to friends and relatives across the county, he had time to produce a healthy crop of vegetables from the garden, and to write to his sisters and other favourite correspondents. He wrote of marriages, deaths, the children overcoming measles, while in her letters to her sister Sarah revealed that Cuthbert’s rheumatism had been much worse than he himself revealed.

  As the winter of 1802–3 closed in, so did the Collingwoods’ social life. Two hundred years ago Northumbrian winters were extremely harsh. The River Tyne still periodically froze solid, as did the Thames, and everybody seemed to suffer from endless colds. Apart from letters, of which none survive, Collingwood’s contact with the outside world was through newspapers. The news was not good. While thousands of curious tourists had taken advantage of the peace to visit Paris, the British government covertly plotted to have Napoleon overthrown, while the First Consul himself was building men-of-war as fast as his yards could turn them out, and had sent an army of occupation to Switzerland in direct contravention of the Amiens agreement. Britain also dragged her heels over the Maltese situation, having begun to believe that if and when she abandoned it to the Knights of St John, a new French tenant would move in without delay.

  In February, the Newcastle Courant reported that the French Ambassador in London, General Andreossi, was contracting English merchantmen to ferry supplies and French troops to San Domingo in the West Indies.6 The slaves of San Domingo, now Haiti, had begun the only successful slave revolt in history as far back as 1792, when the revolutionary government in France had declared its intention to outlaw the slave trade. Napoleon, with an eye to economics, had rescinded the ban and now determined to put the revolt down. British merchant captains were only too happy to work for France so long as she paid. The government, still years away from its own historic ban on slavery, maintained a pragmatic silence.

  In the view of the Newcastle Courant’s editor, much of the talk about a new war was being invented by speculators keen to cash in on fluctuating stocks. But he also noted that ‘France seems determined to exclude the manufactures of Great Britain from every country over which she possesses any influence’. The two protagonists were, it seems, inventing cold war tactics as they went along.

  On 21 February the schooner Pickle, under the command of Lt John Richards Lapenotiere, later famous as the carrier of Collingwood’s Trafalgar dispatches, arrived in London with news from Malta, where Britain was under strong pressure to withdraw the garrison. In France Le Moniteur reported that Bonaparte, responding to a request from the town of Orléans for permission to raise a statue to Jeanne d’Arc, had written:

  United the French nation can never be conquered, but our more calculating and adroit neighbours, abusing the frankness and fidelity of our character, constantly sow amongst us those dissensions from whence resulted the calamities of that epoch, and all the disasters related in our history.7

  Beneath the rhetoric the First Consul, though himself preparing for war, was concerned that it might break out sooner than he wanted. Ideally, he wished to string the Maltese dispute out until the following year, when his military build-up would be complete. But he was pre-empted. Suddenly, on 9 March 1803, King George announced to a shocked parliament:

  His Majesty thinks it necessary to acquaint the House of Commons that, as very considerable military preparations are carrying on in the ports of France and Holland, he has judged it expedient to adopt additional measures of precaution for the security of his dominions.8

  Collingwood, at home in Morpeth, must have read that Lord Nelson had been summoned for urgent talks at the house of the First Lord, Earl St Vincent. He would also have seen that orders were being drafted for naval officers to prepare for sea. But he had already been given private warning of these new developments, as he admitted to Dr Alexander Carlyle:

  We are again threatened with war, and all its miseries. I have little hope that it can be avoided and, in that case, I suppose I shall be employed immediately. I received a letter five days since [i.e. on 11 March] from Sir Evan Nepean,9 to know if I was ready (in the event of being wanted) to go on service at a very short notice. I answered ‘to be sure I was’ and packed up my trunk and my signal book and am now waiting for a summons to take my station wherever it might be.10

  In the same letter he went on to defend his old chief St Vincent who, having come down very hard on corruption and inefficiency in the naval dockyards, was now being blamed (by Nelson among others) for reducing the fleet to dangerously low numbers of ships. Collingwood also included one of those rhetorical cameos that one can almost hear Churchill lisping in a crackling Home Service broadcast 140 years later:

  I have only to hope, if we are compelled to resist by arms, the ambition and perfidy of that arch enemy to the peace and happiness of mankind, that all will feel in their hearts that detestation of his character and that zeal for the preservation and honour of our country which fills mine, that when the day of trial comes we may strike hard, and with God’s help, punish the injustice that would invade its happiness.11

  In Paris, nine days later, a similarly rhetorical exchange took place at the Tuileries, where Lord Whitworth, the British Ambassador, discussed His Majesty’s announcement with the First Consul:

  Whitworth: It is to be hoped that this storm will be dissipated without any serious consequence.

  Bonaparte: It will be dissipated when England shall have evacuated Malta. If not, the cloud will burst, and the bolt must fall.12

  For a few weeks war fever seemed to cool as hard thinking took the place of public posturing. In April Collingwood wrote to his sister that he had not heard another word from the Admiralty. He hoped there might yet be an accommodation with France, though he was not optimistic. Then suddenly on 17 May Britain imposed an embargo on French and Dutch shipping in British ports, and on the following day she declared war. Eleven days later the Newcastle Courant reported:

  On Saturday last, Admiral Collingwood passed through this place on his way to the Admiralty to take a command. The Corporation of this town, in compliment to this gallant officer, have offered an additional bounty of one guinea to each seaman entering to serve in his ship.

  The Courant might also have mentioned that the Admiral travelled with his old and faithful companion, Bounce. The ship in question was initially a frigate, the Diamond, whose earlier namesake had rescued Collingwood and his men from a wrecked Pelican on the Morant Keys in Jamaica, more than twenty years previously. In what must have seemed very cramped quarters, he raised his Admiral’s flag (a red flag at the mizzen) in her and sailed to join Cornwallis off Brest, while the flag ship which had been earmarked for him, Venerable, was made ready in port. His hopes for peace, written less than eighteen months previously, had come back to haunt him. He would never see Morpeth, Sarah, or his daughters again.

  Britain’s maritime strategy, which had proved so successful in the later years of the first part of the war, would continue: blockade the enemy in port, and hope that when they came out they could be brought to battle. Only one more great battle would be fought in this war, and the navy would have to wait two years for it. In the interim, and not before time, England had finally accepted the urgent need to look to her land defences, for Bonaparte seemed more than ever determined to invade and crush his enemy for once and all.

  The unlikely hero of this much neglected theatre of war was Frede
rick, Duke of York. During the first phase of the war his reputation had been built and had fallen on his record as Commander-in-Chief of British forces during their campaigns in the Low Countries. Here he had been defeated at least as much by the incompetence of his allies as by the French. Now, in charge of defending Britain should the navy be beaten at sea,13 he embarked on a three-year programme of fortification and defensive planning unrivalled since the ninth century. Against seemingly overwhelming political and military obstructions, he established plans for defending London and the south-east with fieldworks which could be thrown up within the time it would take Napoleon’s Army of England to cross the Channel: an estimated three days. He ordered reinforcements to be made to the inadequate defences at Plymouth, Portsmouth, Dover and Chatham. He instituted the Royal Military Canal at Romney Marsh in Sussex. And he set in train the construction of seventy-three Martello towers, based on the Mortella at St Florent which had caused Collingwood and Jervis so much trouble in 1795; these would form a shield along the vulnerable coasts of Sussex, Essex and Kent.

  However, such a programme of defences, which ought to have been instigated ten years previously, would not be complete until the year after Trafalgar. In the meantime Bonaparte was beginning to mass his troops and invasion barges once more along the Channel coasts of France and Holland, with their main concentration and headquarters at Boulogne. Across England companies of militia and volunteers were raised in an atmosphere of jingoistic fervour. In Newcastle in June a Loyal Armed Association was sworn in to the number of twelve hundred men. In August they marched in ten companies to the Town Moor, where they received their muskets.14

  In June British forces captured the Caribbean islands of St Lucia and Tobago. An Irish uprising was put down after failing to receive French support, and Bonaparte made the worst land deal in history. In granting America the Louisiana Purchase (800,000 square miles for $27 million) he gave up France’s last aspirations in the New World for something like five cents an acre.15 At the same time in India Bonaparte’s nemesis Arthur Wellesley was winning a victory at Assaye in the Second Mahratta War, a victory that would cement his early reputation as the ‘Sepoy’ general.

  In August Collingwood finally shifted his flag to Venerable, a 74-gun two-decker, and resumed the blockade of Brest. He was well aware of the difficulties of blockading that port: it had two entrances far apart, protected by powerful tides, westerly winds, and rocks which had seen many a wreck. Often, as he reported to his father-in-law, he spent the entire week on deck without ever shifting his clothes, and often stayed awake all night, catching a little sleep now and then on one of the quarterdeck carronades. It was this period of extraordinary tension that his obituarist wrote of, when he described Collingwood:

  upon deck without his hat, and his grey hair floating to the wind, whilst torrents of rain poured down through the shrouds, and his eye, like an eagle’s, on the watch.16

  It is an evocative image, much more so than the stiff and formal poses of his few portraits. He was now convinced that the time had come for Bonaparte to strike decisively. Collingwood’s worry was not that he himself might fail, but that his countrymen might be complacent:

  I think in the course of next month Bonaparte’s experiment of the invasion will be made, and I only hope it will not be held too lightly; in that consists the only danger. They should not only be repulsed, but it should be with such exemplary vengeance as may deter them from any future attempt to subjugate our country. We should give an example to all nations how to preserve their independence.17

  Venerable was sent briefly back to port to replenish towards the end of the summer, and Collingwood shifted his flag to another 74-gun two-decker, Minotaur. But he was soon back in Venerable, able to report that there was no illness in the ship, but concerned that the oncoming cold weather would soon fill his sick bay again; he himself had left port without an extra coat. The Newcastle volunteers raised on his behalf were coming along very well, he thought. But he was worried by accounts that the Spanish might enter the war, coerced by France.18 And soon he would have concerns of his own. He had frequently complained about the state of ships leaving the naval dockyards; the yards’ jobbery and incompetence were legendary enough for Jane Austen to have her Captain Wentworth comment:

  The admiralty … entertain themselves now and then, with sending a few hundred men to sea, in a ship not fit to be employed. But they have a great many to provide for; and among the thousands that may just as well go to the bottom as not, it is impossible for them to distinguish the very set who may be least missed.19

  At the beginning of December Venerable was at Cawsand Bay, initially to have a new foremast fitted after a gale, and to give her hard-worked crew a brief rest. But, as Collingwood reported to his father-in-law:

  Poor creatures, they have been almost worked to death ever since. We began by discovering slight defects in the ship; and the farther we went in the examination, the more important they appeared, until at last she was discovered to be so completely rotten as to be unfit for sea. We have been sailing for the last six months with only a sheet of copper between us and eternity.20

  Venerable, which had done such sterling service in the war, and had been Duncan’s flag ship at Camperdown, was literally falling to pieces, suffering one of the most notorious faults that corruption could contrive. Her planking had been held together with what were nicknamed ‘devil bolts’.21 It had been known since the first experiments with copper-sheathing that copper and iron made a poor mix in sea water (though the electrolytic process was poorly understood), so hull planking was held on to a ship’s hull with copper bolts. But it had occurred to the most unscrupulous shipbuilders that a treenail (a wooden peg) with a copper fitting at either end would look very convincing to a dockyard inspector, and would save a potential fortune on a contract. When the copper and treenail combination failed, as it eventually must, it might do so spectacularly, and some of the ‘forty-thieves’ as these unfortunate ships were known, had literally sprung apart at the seams in a gale and gone down in minutes with all men. To that extent Collingwood and his six hundred men had been lucky.

  The Venerable’s crew and her admiral spent Christmas in Plymouth dock, waiting for an alternative ship to be prepared. This was Culloden, another 74 and a veteran of the Glorious First of June and the battle of Cape St Vincent (she was also, under Thomas Troubridge, present at Aboukir Bay, but ran aground and took no part in the battle). Although he was only in Culloden for a few months before shifting his flag once again, and hating the constant disruption, Collingwood left a lasting impression on one of her midshipman, the young Scot Robert Hay.

  Collingwood joined Culloden on 6 February 1804. He first took notice of Hay during a game which he had instigated among the young gentlemen to keep them active, racing each other to the cross-trees and back to the poop. On one such occasion Hay, feeling himself at a disadvantage after a slip from one of the shrouds, took a short cut by sliding down a backstay, and beating his friend Dennis O’Flanagan by six feet. Considering that he had broken the rules, Collingwood ordered Hay to the masthead. In a fit of pique Hay decided to show his new admiral that he was made of the right stuff, and proceeded to swing himself up on to the main truck, the highest point in the ship. It was a dangerous thing to do, and in front of an admiral with Collingwood’s reputation it was asking for trouble. Hay recalled:

  I then took off my hat and waved it around my head in token of exultation. This drew all the eyes of the forecastle upon me. The Admiral seeing all hands staring aloft looked up too, and saw me in the act of waving my hat. ‘Maintop there, Sir, jump up and bring that boy Hay down instantly.’

  ‘Aye, aye, Sir. Come down here my fine little fellow,’ said Tom Lennox, ‘my eye but you are sure to catch it now; I’ll warrant two dozen will be the least of it. You may see by the quickness of the Admiral’s step that there is something for you in the wind’s eye.’ Down I came with a palpitating heart. The galley, the breach of the gun, the master at
arms, the spun yarn seizings, and, not least, Grimalkin’s namesake with her nine scorpion’s tails, were all passing in review before the mind’s eye. On reaching the quarter deck I stood trembling with hat in hand at the foot of the Jacob’s ladder until the Admiral came forward.

  ‘How high did I order you to go, boy?’

  ‘To the cross-trees, Sir.’

  ‘What business, then, had you at the royal masthead?’

  ‘Dennis was up once, Sir, and often taunts me with my inability; as he and the rest of the boys were looking up, I thought it a good time to shew him that I could go there as easily as himself.’

  He paused about half a minute, a partial frown clouded his features, and I thought he was considering in his own mind how many dozen he would offer me; but his countenance soon softened and brightened, indicating that the squall I dreaded was blown over.

  ‘Well,’ said he, ‘I commend you for endeavouring not to be outstripped in activity; but activity itself may be a fault if not properly regulated. When duty calls, I love to see a man striving for the point of honour and danger; but I can never approve of anyone throwing his life in jeopardy for the sake of a vain boast. You may go below.’22

  Hay’s sketches of Collingwood from the early spring of 1804 reveal all the human subtleties of his command, matured over the decades since his own bitter experience under Haswell. Hay remembered:

  Scarcely could [the ship] be put about at any hour of the night but he would be on deck. There, accompanied by his favourite dog, Bounce, would he stand on the weather gang way snuffing up the midnight air, with his eye either glancing through his long night glass all round the horizon, or fixed on the light carried by Cornwallis in the Ville de Paris …