by Sam Willis
The answer, when it eventually filtered back to London, did nothing to enhance the Lords’ changing impression of Parker. The battle was followed by endless discussion and negotiation, most of which was carried out on behalf of the British by Nelson rather than Parker, something that Parker carefully omitted from his letter.
First, the British insisted that the Danes leave the armed neutrality, something that they could never do for fear of a Russian reprisal that might threaten the very existence of Denmark. The British, on the other hand, were loath to carry out their threat of destroying the Danish fleet or bombarding Copenhagen. No significant threat on their own, the Danes were simply caught between Russia and Britain, and the British knew it. Compromises were suggested and rejected as deadlines were reached and passed. Time slipped away.
Even as Parker wrote his letter describing the battle, he was waiting to hear the result of a final ultimatum sent to the Danes, and even when that deadline passed the British were still willing to negotiate. Two days later and a week after the battle, Nelson went to Copenhagen to hammer out a solution face to face with the Crown Prince of Denmark. During that meeting, one of the Prince’s royal aides slipped into the room and whispered into his ear news that instantly changed the shape of the war and rendered the Battle of Copenhagen one of the most pitiful wastes of human life in the history of warfare. The Tsar of Russia was dead.
Paul had been murdered on 23 March, the day that Parker wrote to the Admiralty with his second plan of attack (p. 219). His domestic and foreign policies, and in particular his recent pro-French U-turn, had alienated much of the Russian nobility. He was dragged out from behind a curtain in his bedroom in St Michael’s Palace in the centre of St Petersburg, given the option of signing his own abdication and, when he refused, strangled and trampled to death by a group of military officers.
With Tsar Paul dead, the Danes knew that the Armed Neutrality would fall apart. They therefore offered the British a 14-week armistice, by the end of which, they knew, the Tsar’s death would be common knowledge and the strategic situation would have changed. They did not, however, share the news and the sudden Danish capitulation came as a welcome surprise. Paul meanwhile was succeeded by his son, Alexander I, who, swiftly and certainly rather suspiciously, turned Russian foreign policy on its heel to adopt a pro-British and anti-French stance. Perhaps the British had a hand in Paul’s assassination, perhaps not. Either way, the moment he died, the Battle of Copenhagen became unnecessary.
British casualty list, 2 April 1801
The scale of that waste is made clear by the list of killed and wounded that Parker included in his dispatches. Written so soon after the battle, these figures increased substantially later, but the immediate numbers were still alarming. A total of 875 British sailors had either been killed or wounded on the day of the battle itself, although that figure rose to 1,200 as more than half of those listed here as wounded died of their wounds. Not listed here are the Danish figures which were higher, the lowest estimation being 1,600 to 1,800 and the total of Danish killed, wounded or taken prisoner is estimated to have been around 6,000.
There is some notable variation among the British figures. The highest casualty figures of 210, well over a third of the crew,11 come from the Monarch, the 74-gunner that anchored in relative isolation opposite two very powerful Danish batteries, the Holsteen and Sjælland. Her crew also suffered when one of her guns burst. In the heat of the action one of her midshipmen, the 17-year-old William Millard, had to run the entire length of the ship to collect quills to prime the guns. He found not a single man standing on the main deck from the mainmast forward. A Danish shot blew both feet off one of his friends as he stood on the forecastle. When he returned to the quarterdeck not a man was alive. One sailor who had lost a leg managed to crawl to the cockpit to find the surgeon, but bled to death where he lay.
The Edgar and Isis also have very high figures, the Edgar because she was the first British ship to enter the King’s Channel and therefore the first to receive much of the Danish fire. Her log records that her rigging was absolutely devastated by the Danish shot and she was lucky to get clear of Copenhagen in the battle’s aftermath.
The Isis was the fourth into the Deep, after the Ardent and Glatton, though she ended up positioning herself just to the rear of the Edgar at the southern end of the Danish defences, just where the floating batteries were particularly powerful and supported by two shore-batteries under the command of Lieutenant Stricker, son of the commander of the Kronborg fortress. She was actually supposed to be behind Nelson’s Elephant, which temporarily grounded as it entered the Channel. Captain Walker took the Isis past the stranded Elephant to get at the enemy and ended up engaging both his own allotted enemy and Nelson’s. When the Elephant freed herself and sailed past the Isis, now heavily engaged, Nelson bellowed, ‘Well done, brave Walker! Go on as you have begun; nothing can be better.’12 A Fourth Rate 50-gun ship, her complement was only 350, so a tally of 112 dead and wounded was large indeed and certainly worsened by the fact that, as with the Monarch, one of her cannon burst. The Bellona also suffered from two burst cannon. It is likely that this exceptionally high instance of British guns bursting was caused by the sailors using double-charges to cope with the unusually extreme range of the combat.
Two other points are worth emphasising. Parker’s flagship London is not listed here because she remained so distant from the action that she received no casualties; and no British ships were captured or destroyed. Yes, this was a bloody action, but it was also another display of crushing dominance.
This list also gives us a research window into the men who fought at Copenhagen, because we can find out, through the ships’ musters, who was aboard. As at the Battle of Camperdown (p. 136), some of those men are worth considering in some depth.
William Bligh of Bounty fame, and now a recent veteran of Camperdown, was back again, this time as captain of the 56-gun Glatton, an experimental ship that was equipped solely with carronades. This had become possible because the great Carron Company of Scotland had recently succeeded in founding 68-pounder carronades. The Glatton mounted 28 68-pounders on her lower deck and 28 48-pounders on her upper deck, a mighty armament that would have been devastating at close range, that is closer than 600 yards.
She poured her fire into Olfert Fischer’s flagship Dannebrog with such efficiency that Fischer was forced to shift his flag. The Dannebrog suffered some of the highest casualty figures of both fleets, with a little less than a third of her complement dead or injured. One of those injured was Commander Braun, whose right hand was blown off. Two hours after her flag was hauled down, she exploded, killing 250 men. At one stage Bligh protected Nelson’s Elephant from a fierce and direct attack by placing the Glatton directly in the line of fire. After the engagement Nelson personally thanked Bligh for his conduct. His action and the relatively high casualty figures of the Glatton thus also account for the unusually low casualty figures of the Elephant.
The Glatton demonstrated her worth in combat but she was also symptomatic of a policy with which Nelson was decidedly unimpressed. In comparison with the slick and uniform body of ships he had commanded at the Nile (p. 178), the fleet which he took into the narrow waters off Copenhagen was both mismatched and awkward. The list of ships above consists of seven 74-gunners, two 64-gunners, a 50-gunner, a 56-gun converted merchantman, an experimental sloop and four frigates, one of which was French-built. In particular, the Glatton, the 56-gun converted merchantman, was found to be cumbersome and unhandy, a burden in such a tight navigation. Indeed, such ships could not only put themselves in danger but others too. The fact that she fought well must not disguise the harm she could have caused to the British operation.
One of the men aboard the flagship London who assisted Nelson with the post-battle negotiation and diplomacy was the Reverend John Scott, a naval chaplain and talented linguist. Nelson and Scott had crossed paths in the Mediterranean, where the latter had demonstrated his political worth
through his mastery of Italian, French and Spanish. He also spoke German, was increasingly competent in Danish and had begun to learn Russian. Nelson and Scott became fast friends and Nelson personally requested his presence in 1805, officially as a chaplain but unofficially as a secretary and interpreter. Scott thus received Nelson’s last wishes at Trafalgar when the Admiral lay on his deathbed, his life blood seeping through the great ship’s planks.
There were also several inventors in the British fleet. Although it is not clear upon which ship he served, one of the British assistant surgeons was none other than William Clanny. Shortly after his return from Copenhagen, Clanny left the navy and went on to become famous for inventing the first safety light for miners, a crucial development that reduced the danger of explosion in collieries caused by the build-up of gas from leaking seams. James Spratt, a midshipman on the Bellona, went on to fight at Trafalgar where he led a boarding party onto the French Aigle, swimming13 to her and climbing up the rudder chains. In the subsequent hand-to hand combat Spratt fought off numerous Frenchmen and threw one bodily from the poop to the quarterdeck. The ship was taken, but not before Spratt was shot in the leg. He refused to have the leg amputated but was crippled for life and ended up serving at the signal station in Teignmouth, Devon. There he invented the ‘homograph’, a system of signalling with arms, hat, oar, sword or handkerchief which formed the basis of semaphore. Another notable inventor was Captain Thomas Bertie of the Ardent. Bertie was an old service friend of both Nelson and Troubridge who, in 1778, had invented the lifebuoy. Bertie’s Ardent, a relatively small ship, suffered a particularly high proportion of casualties.
George Smith, then a midshipman on the 74-gun Agamemnon, was not an inventor but his achievement was no less significant. He too left the navy shortly after Copenhagen to become a radical evangelical missionary and the author of more than 80 books. The plight of sailors was always close to his heart and he committed himself to raising money and awareness to ease what he described as the ‘Sodom and Gomorrah of Sailors’ and to found a ‘marine Jerusalem’. He established endless churches and funds for crippled or destitute sailors and their dependants, as well as others caught in the economic web of dock life and in 1830 established the Maritime Penitent Young Women’s Refuge for the rehabilitation of dockland prostitutes. His influence was such that it was felt worldwide and he rightly enjoys a reputation as the initiator of the worldwide movement of seafarers’ missions. Today the international Mission to Seafarers offers comfort and counsel to those who pursue the peculiar, lonely and dangerous life of the seaman. Smith died in grinding poverty but 2,000 mourners, many of them sailors and their dependants, attended his funeral.
John Ward was another extraordinary man who fought at Copenhagen and was later to make a significant impact on the religious world. In 1801 he was a shipwright on the Blanche but left the service soon after the battle. His life then changed dramatically after a series of visions and dreams convinced him that he was none other than Jesus Christ, his conviction being confirmed by the fact that he was born on 25 December and that his mother was called Mary. He soon began to proclaim himself as the Messiah and renamed himself Shiloh. He was put in the Newington workhouse and branded as mad but promptly escaped. His followers, known as the Shilohites, grew rapidly when he took to the streets proclaiming that the Bible was a fiction, that prayer was useless, that clergymen were liars and that God did not care whether men were good or evil. Ward’s writings, published in no less than 17 volumes at the turn of the 20th century, make quite extraordinary reading.14
Last but by no means least was John Franklin, then a 15-year-old midshipman aboard the frigate Polyphemus. After Copenhagen, Franklin joined Matthew Flinders’12 Investigator, which circumnavigated Australia before being abandoned and replaced by the Porpoise, which duly sank, leaving the crew on a sandbank for six weeks. Franklin then fought on the Bellerophon at Trafalgar and after the war began a career exploring the Arctic in which he greatly expanded our knowledge of the region’s geography. He famously never returned from his final voyage of 1845–6 in search of the Northwest Passage in which every member of the expedition died.
There is no doubt that the Battle of Copenhagen was one of the most dangerous attacks ever mounted at sea. There was an exceptionally high risk of failure. The highly experienced Admiral Thomas Graves, who had fought in both the Seven Years War and the War of American Independence as well as in the French Revolutionary War, noted, ‘Considering the disadvantages of the navigation, the approach to the enemy, their vast number of guns and mortars on both land and sea, I do not think there ever was a bolder attack.’15 His views were shared by many. Thomas Hardy, close friend of Nelson and veteran of the Battle of the Nile, declared it ‘the most daring attack that has been attempted this war’,16 and William Stewart, a lieutenant-colonel of marines serving with Nelson, declared the battle ‘unparalleled in history, & for enterprise & difficulties as well as the length of the contest (for we were five hours in one incessant roar of cannon) … ’17
However, the result of the battle had little impact on the shape of the war because the Tsar was already dead. The issues that had put Britain and Denmark on a collision cause still existed but the forces that had made conflict unavoidable had vanished. The new Tsar was conspicuously pro-British but the question of neutral rights remained and so did the powerful Danish and Russian navies. Both these navies and neutral trade would become significant problems six years later when Napoleon’s extraordinary continental success allowed him to control Baltic politics.
Nor did the victory have any material benefit. With the exception of the Holstein, all of the prizes, 10 in number, were burned, being too elderly or too badly damaged to be of any use in British service. The Battle of Copenhagen therefore carried little weight of any kind. None of Nelson’s captains received gold medals for the action in spite of his fevered pestering of anyone with influence over such matters.
For Parker, this chapter ends where it began. With the Admiralty now in possession of these dispatches to be read alongside the unofficial reports and rumour that further condemned his indecision and weak command, he was immediately withdrawn from the Baltic. He headed back to Suffolk and in December purchased Benhall Lodge, where he settled with his young wife, his reputation in tatters and his active service life over. He did not survive retirement long and was dead within six years.
Nelson, much to his horror, was given Parker’s command and sent further into the Baltic. His service at Copenhagen had left him physically weak and he was struck down by a fever, possibly a recurrence of the malaria he had contracted on his early Caribbean service. He wrote to a friend, ‘A Command never was, I believe, more unwelcomely received by any person than by myself.’18 It soon became clear, however, that the Russians would not pose a threat and that the Swedes and Danes were too preoccupied with each other to cause any trouble. The British public, meanwhile, were fed up with seven years of war which had not brought about a French defeat in spite of the remarkable series of five naval victories. Pitt had imposed a painful income tax to pay for the war, which had also caused fierce inflation. Henry Addington, the new prime minister, was anxious to explore peace.
Napoleon was willing to enter into discussions but constantly shifted his position. After six months of peace on land and sea an agreement was eventually reached and on 25 March 1802 the Peace of Amiens was signed. A year after the Battle of Copenhagen, therefore, Europe was nominally no longer at war. In reality, however, Napoleon’s motivations for peace were deeply suspect and both sides failed to evacuate territories as required by the treaty. When Napoleon sent soldiers into Switzerland and prepared a vast fleet to retake Haiti from rebel slaves, it became clear that his ambitious mind was still active and his appetite for conquest still unsatisfied. The great wars between Britain and France passed into yet another phase and one that would lead to the most famous naval battle in history.
Trafalgar
Trafalgar
21 Octob
er 1805
‘As I trust you are fully aware of the great importance of those dispatches being forwarded as soon as is possible I rely on your using every exertion, that a moment’s time may not be lost in their delivery’
Vice-Admiral C. Collingwood to Lieutenant J. Lapenotiere, 26 October 1805
AT A GLANCE
DATE:
21 October 1805
NAVIES INVOLVED:
British, French and Spanish
COMMANDING OFFICERS:
Rear-Admiral H. Nelson/Vice-Admiral C. Collingwood; Admiral P. Villeneuve/Admiral F.C. Gravina
FLEET SIZES:
British, 27 ships of the line; Allies, 33 ships of the line
TIME OF DAY:
12.00 – 16.30
LOCATION:
Off Cape Trafalgar, Spain. 36°17'34.76"N, 6°15'19.22"E
WEATHER:
Light west north-westerly winds, heavy swell
RESULT:
21 Allied ships captured, one destroyed
CASUALTIES:
British, 1,690; French 4,530; Spanish 2,408