by Sam Willis
The fact that The Glorious First of June was fought at the very height of the Second Terror is a major factor in considering the ‘enemy’. French society had been whipped into a frenzy of ideological fervour by the Jacobins in a bid to unite France against her enemies, both external and internal. The survival of the Revolution was threatened by foreign nations waging wars on her borders as surely as it was by civil war dissolving France’s internal order and security. The revolutionaries had succeeded in removing the monarchy with an unprecedented vision of a fair society but they were now surrounded by enemies and were fighting for survival without international allies. The ancient European monarchies that surrounded France had been horrified by the execution of Louis XVI and had united in opposition to the Revolution. With the military strength of the young Republic too weak to attract or force alliances, the enemy that faced the Royal Navy in 1794 was the French navy alone.
That navy was, however, unlike any other navy that had ever been raised by France. The Revolution had affected all sections of French society and the navy had suffered particularly severely for its close association with the ancien régime and the aristocracy. Before the Revolution, naval officers were not only required to be aristocratic but to demonstrate descent from four generations of aristocracy. The navy, moreover, was closely associated with the personal ambitions and desires of the King. The ships were even named for the perceived qualities of Bourbon monarchy: Foudroyant (devastating or stunning), Glorieux (glorious or proud), Magnanime (magnanimous or noble), Victorieux (victorious or triumphant) and Courageux (brave).
The new leaders of the Revolution simply did not trust the navy, and its officer corps suffered an unforgiving purge. Many experienced officers were forced out and, while some were imprisoned and others executed, many more simply never returned to their ships.
Things were not made any easier in August 1793 when the French Mediterranean naval base and city of Toulon surrendered to Vice-Admiral Samuel Hood without a shot being fired. The Jacobins sensed base treachery on the part of their navy, when the real reasons for Toulon’s surrender were far more complex. The Jacobin response was a witch-hunt for traitors that drove yet more experienced men out of the navy. By the winter of 1793 very few naval aristocrats remained confident that their transparent loyalty to the new regime would keep them safe. One who did, however, was Louis-Thomas, the Comte Villaret de Joyeuse. Not only an aristocrat, Villaret had even worked as a member of the King’s guard. Nevertheless he was promoted to admiral when it became clear that he was one of only a handful of officers who commanded the respect of his men. During a widespread mutiny at Brest in the autumn of 1793, the crew of Villaret’s ship was one of very few that retained its discipline.
For all of Villaret’s social skills, however, he had no experience of commanding fleets in battle and his experience of fighting at sea in any format was limited to the command of a frigate in the East Indies during the War of American Independence. To make matters worse, his captains shared his inexperience. Only one of Villaret’s captains or flag-officers had commanded a ship in fleet battle before. Of the three flag-officers in the Brest fleet, two, including Villaret himself, had recently been lieutenants and the third a sub-lieutenant. Three of the captains had been lieutenants, 11 had been sub-lieutenants, nine had been captains or even mates of merchant ships, one had been a boatswain, one a seaman and the remaining captain was so insignificant that he has left no trace of a previous career of any description in the written records.4 Few officers of any rank had more than two years’ experience of their post.
Another major area of concern was at the level of gunner. Before the Revolution, a corps of seamen gunners had trained men in the exacting arts of naval gunnery but this had been dissolved because of its members’ suspect loyalties and the powerful position they commanded within the ships’ crews. A potential source of mutiny had been removed but at the expense of gunnery skill. Thus not only did the French navy lack experienced officers, it also lacked experienced sailors to man the guns.
However, while they may have lacked experience, the resolve of the French sailors in Brest was stiffened in the spring of 1794 by judicious use of the guillotine. In the aftermath of the surrender of Toulon, Jeanbon Saint André, a member of the Committee for Public Safety, was sent to Brest to ensure that the Atlantic fleet did not capitulate in the same way as its Mediterranean counterpart. With the Atlantic fleet now all that France had left to defend her coasts, the stakes could not have been higher and Jeanbon acted accordingly. He transformed the dockyard into a hive of industry; he harangued and threatened sailors to respect officers; he urged and encouraged officers to respect their men; he repaired ships and he requisitioned martial supplies and men. In so doing, Jeanbon built a navy to defend his Republic.
The British, meanwhile, had a very limited idea of the impact of the Revolution on the French navy. They knew, at least, that the dockyard at Brest was buzzing with activity but they did not know that the quality of the service’s manpower had suffered so badly. The French navy was rotten inside but Jeanbon had polished its skin until it gleamed. A significant distinguishing factor of this battle, therefore, was the unknown quality of the enemy that the British faced. The war was already two years old and there had been several frigate actions and one recent action between two small squadrons but, as yet, there had been no large fleet action. There had not, in fact, been a fleet action between the British and French for 11 years. The French had all fought bravely in the few small actions since the start of the war but fleet warfare demanded so much more. How would the enemy captains control their ships in relation to each other? How swiftly could they form a line of battle from a cruising formation? How well could they recover their cohesion if routed by a successful attack? How swiftly and competently could they manoeuvre their ships, either individually or as a fleet? All of this was crucial information if the British were to win a fleet battle, but it could only be ascertained and then used to advantage by a man of immense naval skill and experience. In the summer of 1794 there was no finer or more experienced British seaman than Richard Howe.
The Sea dog
Howe was a difficult man to get to know and one’s reaction to him rather depended on where and how one met him. His career spanned politics and the navy and his reputation in both worlds differed wildly. He served as Member of Parliament for Dartmouth for 25 years and had enjoyed a stint as Treasurer of the Navy before being honoured with the position of First Lord of the Admiralty in the peace that followed the War of American Independence. It was a notorious time of political faction and many politicians suffered from partisan bickering. Howe suffered particularly badly and was out of his depth in the cut and thrust of the vigorous, fluid politics of the 1780s. A decade later, when he returned to sea and took command of the Channel Fleet, such was his political reputation that several high-ranking officers openly refused to have anything to do with him. Vice-Admiral John Jervis, the future victor of the Battle of St Vincent (fig. 5), determined to ‘oppose him in everything’. The impact of Howe’s political naivety seems to have been increased by an inability to encourage friendship. He was fiercely private and contemporaries variously described him as silent, morose, inaccessible, strange, awkward, shy, austere and cold. His portraits, and particularly that by John Singleton Copley, reveal a man with deep bags under his eyes, standing ever so slightly stooped as if weighed down by the burdens of high rank (fig. 3).
A line must be drawn, however, between Howe’s political and naval lives. At sea, social skills were less of a concern for a man who could lead by example or who demonstrably cared for his crews, and Howe was undoubtedly both. For all of his awkwardness, which led the politician Horace Walpole to declare that he ‘never made a friendship but at the mouth of a cannon’,5 Howe certainly could make friends at that cannon’s mouth. His earliest biographer believed that the sailors’ attachment to Howe was ‘unexampled’. Their loyalty stemmed from his unmatched dedication to improving their living and
working conditions and his famous courage, both of which were magnified by the length of his naval service. By 1794, he had served in the navy for 59 years, having joined as a nine-year-old boy. He was famed for firing the shots off Newfoundland that led to the capture of the French 64-gunner Alcide and began the Seven Years War at sea. He went on to distinguish himself in that war when he attacked a shore fortification off Rochefort with such ferocity and from such a close and perilous position that he drove the French from their guns, causing his enemy to wonder in amazement that ‘something more than a man must be on board that ship’.6 Howe then fought in the American War with great facility, regularly out-foxing and out-manoeuvring his French rivals in a cat-and-mouse game played off New York in 1778. In 1782 he again distinguished himself by escorting a fleet of vulnerable transports to the besieged fortress of Gibraltar, an operation executed under the guns of a powerful Franco-Spanish fleet. When his behaviour during that operation was questioned by a fellow naval officer, Captain John Hervey, Howe called Hervey out to a duel and his opponent backed down. Howe was not a man to be provoked.
By 1794, however, his time as an active naval officer had ended. He was 68 and suffered so badly from gout that he had tried to cure it by standing on a stingray, a well-known but nonetheless extreme cure. He was then forced out of retirement to command the Channel Fleet at the insistence of the King, who was certainly fond of Howe but was also severely restricted in his choice of flag-officers. Of those with fighting experience from the previous war, the War of American Independence, George Rodney, Richard Kempenfelt and George Darby were dead, Edward Hughes was fully retired and would be dead within a year and Samuel Hood, the obvious candidate, had already been posted to the Mediterranean. Howe, languishing in Bath to cure his ills, was summoned by the King and sent back to sea. How would the elderly, unwell and reluctant Howe fare against the youthful determination and inexperience of Villaret?
A major problem that Howe faced was the manning of his fleet. The traditional view of this period emphasises the difficulty with which the French fleet was manned in the chaos of revolution and under their archaic manning system, the system de classes, which required all men from the coastal provinces of France to serve one year in three, four or five, depending on the size of the province and the needs of the fleet. However the British system was also straining under the burden of war. The pick of the navy’s men and ships had already sailed to the Mediterranean under Samuel Hood and Howe failed to make up the shortfall. Some of those raised were mere boys, many with no experience of ships, let alone of fighting. Rear-Admiral Thomas Pasley of the Bellerophon was furious that some of his marines were too young and weak even to carry a musket. When he eventually left Spithead to cruise in Biscay, all of Howe’s ships, with the exception of one, the 98-gun Glory, were undermanned. The seven First and Second Rates of the fleet were 766 men short while the 18 Third Rate ships, those powerful 74-gun two-deckers that formed the backbone of the fleet, were no less than 1,629 men short. We also know that the British crews were not exercised at the guns or sails as systematically or as regularly as has long been assumed. Some ships, Howe’s flagship being the best example, practised regularly in the days before the fleet left Spithead, but we know from their logs that nine of the fleet, that is just under a third, had either no practice or had practised just once when they left to face the French.
In comparison with the French captains, however, the British captains were highly experienced. All 23 had experience of fleet action, six of them more than four times. The most experienced had fought in three wars, the War of the Austrian Succession (1739–58), the Seven Years War (1756–63) and the War of American Independence (1775–83). Nine had fought at the most decisive actions of the previous 50 years, the two Battles of Finisterre (1747), the Battles of Lagos and Quiberon Bay (1759) and the Battle of the Saints (1782). For all that experience, however, Howe was still concerned about how they would react under gunfire. We know that he confided to a midshipman of his flagship that he would refuse any opportunity of action at night as he needed daylight ‘to see how my own captains conduct themselves’.7 His concern was based on a well-established tradition of British captains failing to do as their admiral ordered.
Nevertheless the British public bayed for, and expected, naval success. News of the activity in Brest flew across the Channel as surely as the rumours of butchery in the streets and entire families being carted off to the guillotine. The populace was terrified that the French would invade and pollute British society with their extremism and horror. And they placed their faith in the navy. The expectation heaped upon Howe and his fleet was not entirely justified by recent form, however. The navy had enjoyed convincing victories against the French at the Battle of the Saints in 1782 and at the Moonlight Battle of 1780 but they had been a full 12 and 14 years earlier respectively and were but two of the several battles fought during the War of American Independence. The rest of them had been either hard-fought draws or British losses. It had been during the war before that, the Seven Years’ War, that British victory had first become regular, sustained and in any way ‘expected’. And that war had ended in 1762, 32 years before Howe took charge of his fleet and set sail in May 1794 to meet the navy of the nascent French republic.
The Convoy
France had been starving since the early spring of 1794. In the previous year the Committee of Public Safety had launched a programme of enforced conscription to raise a vast army, intended to be some 750,000 strong. The young men who worked the fields now learned to work muskets; the carts that once carried crops now carried army victuals; and the horses that once worked the fields now pulled gun carriages. To make matters worse, spring was always a time of want. The year’s supply of grain had been consumed and the barns lay empty, waiting for the new harvest.
The only solution was to import the necessary food. Failure to do so would increase internal disorder and threaten the survival of the Republic itself. The stakes could not have been higher. And so Robespierre looked for a trading partner and found one in America. The American colonies had recently won their independence from British rule with their own revolution and a significant portion of Americans, though by no means all, were sympathetic towards the French struggle. Although the Americans remained officially neutral in the conflict, the French found in them a willingness to trade.
Throughout April a vast convoy of French merchantmen gathered in Chesapeake Bay under the wings of an escorting force commanded by Rear-Admiral Pierre-Jean Vanstabel. When the convoy was ready to leave it consisted of no less than 156 ships, worth in total some £1.5 million. The ships’ holds contained 67,000 barrels of flour, hides, bacon and salt-beef, 11,241 barrels of coffee and 7,163 barrels of sugar, cotton, cocoa, rice and indigo. There was so much to carry that even the warships loaded trade goods. None of this could be carried out in secret and soon the British came to hear of the convoy. It offered an extraordinary opportunity to weaken the French war machine by depriving it of vital foodstuffs and thus of threatening the political position of the tottering Robespierre. Its capture was considered by the British government to be ‘an object of the most urgent importance to the success of the present war’ and it was perfectly clear that the French would do everything in their power to protect it. The arrival of the convoy would therefore also provide an opportunity to bring the main French fleet to battle.
The British assault was two-pronged. To the south, deep into Biscay, sailed Rear-Admiral George Montagu with a squadron of six 74-gunners and three frigates. His orders were to find the convoy and return with it to Britain. Howe, meanwhile, was charged with preventing the French fleet from protecting the convoy and, if possible, destroying it. So, while Montagu headed south, Howe headed for Brest and sent fast frigates ahead to discover the location and strength of the French fleet. He found them in Brest but he was driven off station by a severe westerly wind. When he finally returned to the French coast, Brest harbour, so recently full of the clank and rattle of mariti
me industry, was empty except for a few sorry hulks too rotten to sail or too ill-equipped to fight. Villaret had seen Howe’s frigates in Brest Roads as surely as the frigates had seen Villaret in Brest, and the Frenchman had quickly reached the conclusion that the British fleet was out in force. He had had no choice but to sail to protect his convoy.
Howe sailed west, hunting desperately for the French. Not only could they now protect their convoy but they could also overwhelm Montagu’s far smaller squadron; it had become essential to intercept Villaret. Although initially three days behind, Howe soon began to find evidence of the French as he came across merchantmen who had seen them pass or others who had been captured by the French fleet and were being taken back to port as prizes of war. All were mopped up by the British and most burned so that Howe did not have to sacrifice any of his weakened warship crews to man the prizes. Combining intelligence of their rough location with his seaman’s sense of where a fleet might be after three days in the extant sea and weather conditions, Howe began to sense Villaret’s location. He headed north and then dramatically east after receiving new intelligence that he had already passed him. Villaret, meanwhile, had heard rumours of Howe’s position and headed east to avoid contact. On 28 May 1794, therefore, we find both Howe and Villaret heading east along almost the same line of latitude, Montagu heading back to Plymouth having been unable to locate the convoy and Vanstabel rapidly closing from the west on both Villaret’s and Howe’s location.