by Sam Willis
Seapower and sea control were therefore never absolute, even after all of these victories. Fighting against this continuous threat, the Royal Navy was directly and constantly associated with notions of wealth and liberty, powerful indeed for a nation whose lifeblood was mercantilism. The army, by contrast, was burdened with a reputation for tyranny. There was no standing police force in the 1790s and the common domestic experience of the army was as a tool for crowd control. The army was also intimately associated with absolutist government and the imposition of alien rule, a reputation gained more than a century before in the English Civil War and Cromwell’s subsequent military dictatorship. Its campaigns on foreign soil, deep in the heart of Europe, usually thousands of miles from British territory, did nothing to amend that reputation.
The army was therefore feared as much as the navy was loved, something neatly summed up in an article in the St. James’s Chronicle, one of the popular London papers of the time, shortly after The Glorious First of June in 1794.
‘The extacy of joy displayed by the public on receiving the news of Lord Howe’s glorious victory, proves how much more Britons are delighted by success at sea than on land. The sea is our protecting element, and as long as Britannia rules the waves nothing can hurt us. A victory at sea must ever give us more heart-felt pleasure than twenty victories on the Continent.’12
The naval dispatches therefore carried news that was interpreted in terms of financial, personal and national security. Naval battles were celebrated for preserving the status quo, not for expanding the empire: there is something of the Battle of Britain about them all.
The Recipients
We must also be careful to consider the Secretaries of the Admiralty, the individual men to whom the dispatches were addressed. The contact point between the Admiralty Board and serving naval officers, they were men of immense knowledge and experience whose devotion to the service was as great as any who sailed the ships. Their renowned longevity was one of the key factors in the consistency of British seapower from the mid-17th century onwards. Although Samuel Pepys is often remembered as the most famous Secretary of the Admiralty, many more wielded greater influence for far longer. Josiah Burchett, once a clerk to Pepys, served 28 Admiralty Boards over a career spanning 48 years; Philip Stephens was Admiral George Anson’s secretary and then enjoyed 24 years as an administrator for the Navy Office and the Admiralty before he became Secretary of the Admiralty, a post he then held for 32 years; and Thomas Corbett served in various roles within the Admiralty for 27 years before he became Secretary.
In the century before the first of these battles, only four men held the post of Secretary of the Admiralty. There followed something of a flurry; as many Secretaries of the Admiralty served in the 12 years of these battles between June 1794 and February 1806 as had served in the 53 years between 1742 and 1795. Philip Stephens was the man in possession when Howe wrote the first of these dispatches in June 1794. He was replaced shortly afterwards, in March 1795, by Evan Nepean who served as Secretary for the next nine years. The dispatches of five of the eight battles, therefore, were first seen and dealt with by Nepean. He was then replaced in January 1804 by William Marsden, the incumbent when news of Trafalgar and San Domingo reached London. Each of these talented men lived fascinating lives in their own right, which I have sketched in an Appendix (p. 342).
The Secretaries’ professional endurance was extraordinary by any standard. They worked themselves into the ground, frequently to the point of illness, to ensure that the British naval machine continued to function. These men may not have stood on a quarterdeck to brave a hail of grape shot but they risked the death of 1,000 paper cuts. It is telling that, when Lieutenant John Lapenotiere arrived at the Admiralty with the Trafalgar dispatches at 1.00 a.m. on 6 November, William Marsden was awake and working. Three months later, when Duckworth’s dispatch arrived, Marsden wrote:
‘I had a terrible day of it – was knocked up at three o’clock in the morning, when I had got about an hour-and-half’s sleep, called up Mr Grey at four, having by that time arranged and docketed my papers, and drawn out a bulletin. I then worked till seven, and lay down in hopes of getting a little sleep – but it would not do; so I returned to the office, and worked there till Mr Grey’s dinner was ready’.13
And these men were valued; from 1800 the Secretary received double the pay of the First Lord. A contemporary noted of the Admiralty Secretary:
‘Whosoever cons the ship of the Admiralty, the Secretary is always at the helm. He knows all the reaches, buoys and shelves of the river of Parliament, and knows how to steer clear of them all. He is the spring that moves the clockwork of the whole Board, the oracle that is to be consulted on all occasions: he sits at the Board behind a great periwig, peeping out of it like a rat out of a butter firkin’14
A proprietorial presence still hovers rather menacingly over the dispatches. Now they are public documents but then they were private letters. They are addressed not to the Lords of the Admiralty, the Government, the King or the country but to a single man, to Philip Stephens, to Evan Nepean or to William Marsden.
One of the great paradoxes of the dispatches, therefore, is that they are private documents concerning matters of great public moment. All three Secretaries had a habit of folding over the bottom left-hand corner where they would scribble a reminder of the Admiralty Board’s decision15 and Nepean ‘marked’ the letters with innumerable ticks, like a manic school teacher.
The dispatches are personally addressed to the Secretaries of the Admiralty.
The bottom left-hand corner has been folded over and the Board’s decision summarized.
Marsden, by comparison, was remarkably restrained. The Trafalgar dispatches he received are almost unmarked, but those describing San Domingo are decorated with small ticks though sparingly, as if he was embarrassed that he had begun to mimic his illustrious predecessor.
Nepean ticks relevant passages in this letter from Admiral Jervis.
To help them exercise their duty the Secretaries had their own private secretaries, messengers and a body of clerks. The navy that these men administered with parchment and quill was one of the largest and most complex organisations ever to have existed. The figures from a single ship alone are impressive. Consider a 74-gunner, a two-decked Third Rate warship, the backbone of most fleets during this period. She was fast and manoeuvrable but still sufficiently strong to stand in line of battle and hold her own against the leviathans of the age of sail, the three-decked First Rates of 100–130 guns. That 74-gunner contained a crew of more than 600 men and 1,200 tons of food. Cows, pigs, goats, sheep and fowl of numerous types berthed alongside the men. She was propelled by sails that blocked out two acres of sky and those sails were worked by 25 miles of rigging. Her 74 guns produced more firepower than all of Napoleon’s artillery at the Battle of Austerlitz. And that was just one relatively small ship. Some of the largest had crews of 1,200 men or more and displaced at least 3,000 tons or roughly twice as much as a standard 74-gunner of the 1790s. Now consider a fleet of warships. At Trafalgar in 1805 we know that the British fleet consisted of approximately 17,000 men in 27 ships mounting 2,148 cannon. The combined Franco-Spanish fleet was larger still, with some 30,000 men in 33 ships mounting 2,632 guns. Now consider an entire navy. In 1795 the Royal Navy consisted of 123 ships of the line and 160 cruisers manned by 99,608 men. A year later the size of the navy exceeded 100,000 for the first time, and by 1806, when the last of these battles was fought, the total had reached 122,860. To maintain that force in 1795 the British Parliament voted £7,806,169, which had risen to £15,864,341 by 1806.
To see just one fleet of sailing warships come over the horizon under full sail, their canvas wings rising up as if from out of the very ocean’s depths, was to witness one of humanity’s greatest engineering and administrative achievements. To see two such fleets together, in a small area of sea room, one intent on destroying the other, was to witness the tension of human drama at its zenith. To witness
, and survive, the subsequent battle was an experience that could damage men’s souls as surely as the flying splinters could break their bones. The Lords of the Admiralty knew the power of these letters when they collected them together; and they knew that they must be shared. Now, for the first time, we can give them the audience that they deserve.
A Note On The Transcriptions
Considerations of space make it impossible to reproduce a transcription of every dispatch in the collection, although the majority are included here. I thoroughly encourage any reader to go back to the original and discover the volume in its entirety. It can be ordered through the Manuscript Department of the British Library, quoting ref: Add. MSS. 23207.
For reasons of economy I have excluded the dispatch relating to Lord Bridport’s victory off Groix in June 1795. Bridport’s original letter does survive in good condition although it has none of the accompanying material that can be found in the other battles’ dispatches. It did not therefore warrant a chapter of its own. Nonetheless the fact that Bridport’s dispatch was included in the original collection, when James Saumarez’s action of July 1801 was not, remains an interesting talking point and an important aspect of the collection’s identity.
Spellings in the years 1794–1806 were not yet firm and formalised, nor were capitalisation and punctuation. Nelson, for example, wrote almost without punctuation, his text decorated with random capital letters which were his favourite way of emphasising words. Since it seems an abrupt break in continuity to call attention to such contemporary usages with a [sic], this device has been employed only in the most extraordinary circumstances.
Small omissions, where text is irrelevant, are marked by ...
Some letters are truncated down one side where they have been trimmed and the missing letters or words have had to be inferred. Significant inclusions have been italicised.
The result is intended to keep the letters as close as possible to the original.
A glossary is included to help with the technical terms.
The Glorious First of June
Le Combat de Prairial
1 June 1794
‘The Commander of a Fleet ... is unavoidably so confined in his view ... as to be little capable of rendering personal testimony’
Admiral Richard Howe, 6 June 1794
AT A GLANCE
DATE:
1 June 1794
NAVIES INVOLVED:
British and French
COMMANDING OFFICERS:
Admiral Earl Howe and Rear-Admiral Villaret-Joyeuse
FLEET SIZES:
British, 25 ships of the line; French, 26 ships of the line
TIME OF DAY:
0915–1315, and sporadically to 1430
LOCATION:
400 nautical miles south west of Ushant
44° 26'58.38"N 13° 03' 26.81"W
WEATHER:
Fresh breeze at south by west; moderate swell
RESULT:
6 French ships captured, 1 sunk
CASUALTIES:
(including battles on 28–29 May): British, 1,098; French, c. 2,654
BRITISH COURT MARTIALS:
Captain Molloy (at his request); dismissed from command of the Caesar
DISPATCHES CARRIED HOME BY:
Captain Roger Curtis, Howe’s flag captain
The Banner
My favourite piece of maritime heritage from the age of sail is a flag, a great silk-tasselled banner in the collection of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. Embroidered in gold thread in its centre is the chilling exhortation: ‘Marins La Republique Ou La Mort’ – or ‘Sailors The Republic or Death’ (fig. 2). It was flown aboard L’America, a French warship which fought and was captured by the British at The Glorious First of June. It is a special object because it is so powerful; it says a great deal about the period in which it was created and about the day on which it was captured.
The words speak of a foreign country urging its sailors to fight to the death for an elusive idea. This battle was not fought over gold or for the territorial ambitions of a distant king but for the people and by the people. The flag is not addressed to officers but to ‘sailors’, a word deliberately chosen because it encompassed everyone aboard ship. An admiral was a sailor in the same way that a powder-monkey was a sailor; to win they all had to fight, even if it was in different ways. The words scream energy and commitment because they refer to a Republic that already existed in an age when republics were forged only in misery and fire. This is not an exhortation to create a republic but to fight on behalf of an existing republic. The banner tells of risks taken and of battles already won. It thus points to the future by recalling the past, the very essence of all history, but its message is especially merciless. There is more than a hint of double-talk about its apparently simple expression. On the one hand, it suggests that French sailors were expected to fight and to die for their cause; on the other it implies that any French sailor who did not fight with sufficient commitment would be killed – by his own side. There is no doubt that the purpose of this simple order is to threaten as much as it is to encourage.
The colour, feel and texture of the flag are also special. It can now only be viewed in the unreal stillness of an archival room but it is still possible to imagine this mighty banner curling in the wind, wrapping around a giant staff carried high by a chosen standard bearer. Its silky look and imagined movement bring to mind the multi-sensory nature of fleet battle where scarlet uniforms and shining silver belt buckles could be glimpsed through smoke which stung the eyes and choked the lungs; where sea spray ran down sailors’ faces like tears and the force of explosions was so great that they were as much felt as heard. In all this confusion, the banner was as much a specific rallying point as a general exhortation to unite in a single purpose. We know that it belonged to the boarding division of L’America and one can imagine the sailors hustling together and brandishing short pikes and hand axes, the thrusting and hacking weapons that could be used in a crowd where there was little space to swing a sword.
The banner is utterly compelling. It is a powerful reminder of just how alien the period is generally, as much as it is a reminder of how alien 1794 was particularly. The French Republic, only two years old, was in the grip of the Terror, ruled through the threat of the guillotine by Maximillian Robespierre and his Jacobin colleagues of the Committee of Public Safety. All French sailors – officers, men and boys – were as terrified of being executed by their political masters as they were of being killed by the enemy. These unique circumstances led to a fleet battle unlike any that had ever been fought and one which would soon become renowned as the hardest fought battle of the age of sail.
The Extremists
The British thought that the French Revolution was rather a good idea until the French killed their King. In 1789, the year that the Bastille fell, the Revolution was praised by the British Ambassador in Paris and the House of Commons proposed a ‘day of thanksgiving for the French Revolution’.1 A popular poem even celebrated the new-found freedom of the old enemy.
There is not an English heart that would not leap
That ye were fallen at last, to know
That even our enemies, so oft employed
In forging chains for us, themselves were free.2
This all changed in January 1793 when a man called Citoyen [Citizen] Louis Capet was marched to a scaffold in the centre of Paris where his head was roughly shaved and he was strapped to a horizontal wooden board. That board was then pushed forward so that the nape of his neck was exposed as a thin target of ivory to a dark blade that never missed. Drums rolled and the vast sea of heads that bobbed together in the Place de La Révolution stilled for a moment as the audience held its breath. Then those heads saw one other head fall into a waiting basket. It was the head of a man who had once been their king but who had been stripped of all signs and symbols of monarchy. For Citizen Louis Capet was none other than Louis Auguste de France, the 16th King Louis of Franc
e, the eighth King of the Bourbon dynasty, and the thirtieth king to have reigned in the 802 years since the foundation of the Capetian dynasty in AD 987.
It is well known that France during the Revolution was unrecognisable from France before the Revolution. It is less well known that ‘The Revolution’ can be divided into numerous periods, each of which has its own distinct cultural flavour. Even if one takes a very broad brush, there is the Revolution at the storming of the Bastille, the Revolution at the execution of Louis XVI, the Revolution under the Jacobins and the Revolution under the Directory. The battle that became known as The Glorious First of June was fought during the reign of the Jacobins, five years after the storming of the Bastille and more than a year after the execution of Louis.
The Jacobins were an unforgiving political faction that dominated French politics during a year of utter turmoil from 1793 that became known as the Reign of Terror. It was in this period that loyalty to the Revolution was strictly defined and the populace rigidly divided into its friends and foes. Enemies or, more accurately, those who were perceived as enemies swiftly found themselves under the iron blade of the guillotine, their last view of the world the bottom of a woven rush basket stained with blood. The Terror itself can be sub-divided into the First Terror of the summer of 1793 and the Second Terror of the summer of 1794, when everything accelerated into a crazy whirlwind of baseless prosecution and inequitable persecution. Over half of all the Terror’s victims died in June and July 1794 alone and, in those same two months, more were executed in six weeks than in the previous 15 months.3