The Years of Endurance

by Arthur Bryant

  1 The acting Governor of the little station was young Zachary Macaulay, the father of the historian.

  2 H. M. C. Dropmore, II, 634. See also 611-13. 3Nicolas, 11, 32-3.

  thus devolved on Lord Hotham, who was well described as a gentleman-like man but past the time of day for action.1 As a result, when the French fleet put out from Toulon in March with untrained crews it was not annihilated as it deserved. Instead it was able, by good luck, to capture a crippled British seventy-four, and regain its base after an inconclusive engagement off Leghorn. The affair was only redeemed by Captain Nelson who, with a ship much inferior in size and gun-power, pursued and badly mauled the 8o-gun Ca Ira. Hotham made no attempt to follow up his brilliant subordinate's feat. " We must be contented," he told him, " we have done very well" Nelson afterwards confided to a friend that, had he taken ten sail and allowed the eleventh to escape, he would never have called it well done.

  The Navy had not only to keep watch in European waters, it had to conduct operations in a pestilential climate thousands of miles away on the other side of the Atlantic. Here things, so bright seemingly in the spring of 1794, were going increasingly badly. Jervis and Grey had been driven into resignation in the autumn by an incredibly tactless letter of Dundas's, who, surrendering to the city, had backed false changes of corruption brought against them by West Indian merchants. The reinforcements promised to the fever-stricken garrisons never arrived, or when they did were far below the strength announced in the Secretary of State's letters. In March, 1795, Major Thomas Picton—many years later to become famous as the hardest-swearing general in the Peninsula—found 2600 raw boys, landed at Barbados instead of 10,000 men promised, riddled with typhus, too weak to hold arms, and without clothing for tropical campaigning. All the while French reinforcements kept slipping through the blockade: 6000 troops from Brest reached Guadeloupe in January. A few weeks later a negro rebellion broke out in the Windward Islands. In Grenada the governor and leading inhabitants were murdered; in St. Vincent the garrison was forced to take shelter in the coastal forts.

  The rising was the price of Parliament's decision to postpone the abolition of the slave trade. The Jacobins, whose principles were truer in this to eternal law than those of their adversaries, reaped the benefit. The black man, with his numbers and immunity

  1 " His soul has got down to his belly and never mounts higher now."— Windham Papers, I, 294.

  to the climate, fought on their side. The British Government, despite the entreaties of its commanders on the spot, even forbade the enlistment of loyal negroes lest military service should discontent them with their lot. The powerful West Indian Committee in London bitterly opposed every move towards a saner policy. Only General Vaughan's enrolment, in defiance of Dundas' instructions, of a small number of slaves with a promise of emancipation as a reward for good service, averted the total eclipse of British dominion in the islands.

  The Secretary of State for War deserved better of his country in the courage and promptitude with which he faced the threat to the eastern empire caused by the collapse of Holland. Dundas suffered from all the obvious failings of the parliamentary lobby-man in a rich country. But his zeal for the Imperial assets he administered was beyond doubt. The craven surrender of Amsterdam placed the Dutch East India Company's trading stations at Cape Town and Ceylon within the reach of France. Refusing to contemplate Jacobin domination of the sea route to the Orient, Dundas at once sent off duplicate dispatches to India instructing the Governor-General to take immediate steps to secure the Dutch possessions. Simultaneously he obtained from the lethargic Stadtholder an order to the Governor of the Cape to receive a friendly force. By the time the Batavian Republic declared war in May, the first of three British contingents was off the coast of South Africa. To forestall a Franco-Dutch expedition, the Government took great risks, sending out of the country a considerable part of its inadequate military force and dispatching it, in the spring gales, without convoy past an unblockaded Brest. But the stake was nothing less than the safety of India.

  The Dutch surrender had a further embarrassing consequence. Amsterdam was the banking centre of the world and British trade was inextricably bound up with Dutch finance. Since the Revolution of 1688 the two countries, both libertarian and plutocratic, had been commercially interdependent. In the long run the flight of capital from Holland enriched Britain and enabled her by underground rivers of gold to sustain a long war. But for the moment it threatened the fabric of her monetary system and world-wide commerce. The French, contrasting her bagman's dominion with their own self-contained power, confidently awaited the downfall of La nation boutique of Barere's contemptuous phrase.

  They reckoned without Pitt's obstinate courage or Britain's. " It has pleased inscrutable Providence," the former told the House of Commons, " that this power of France should triumph over everything that has been opposed to it. But let us not therefore fall without making any efforts to resist it. Let us not sink without measuring its strength." 1

  Yet Britain's resources both of men and money were put to a test never visualised when she went to war. When the Prussians and Dutch gave up the fight there were only 60,000 troops in the country including Militia and Fencibles. Even this force represented a 300 per cent increase on the pre-war establishment. The Coalition Government, grasping the magnitude of the crisis, now took immediate steps to augment the Army. In a single day it sanctioned the raising of fifteen additional Fencible battalions. Despite the heavy losses of the Flemish and West Indian campaigns it planned to have nearly 300,000 men under arms by the end of 1795. Added to the 100,000 or more needed to man the Fleet the figure, though still far below the proportionate contribution demanded of France by the Jacobin exponents of total war, represented no insignificant part of the population.

  These forces had to be raised by voluntary enlistment. Except for the use of press-gangs to man the fleet, legal compulsion was repugnant to the spirit and constitution of the country. The slightest attempt to apply it provoked a storm of opposition: jealousy of the Executive was strongly ingrained in all classes. The very word conscription was tainted with enemy origin.

  Instead, in an age when the transmission of popular intelligence was slow and uncertain, the Government was reduced to such undignified shifts as touting at the prison gates and offering pardons to convicts and crown debtors in return for enlistment. But its chief resort was to the profit motive—the normal peace-time incentive of a free people. To any rogue capable of raising recruits ample reward was promised and no questions asked. In one case the War Office entered into a contract with a self-styled captain to supply 4000 Irish recruits at twenty guineas a head. Kidnapping became the profession of the hour. Every device from debauchery 1

  1 War Speeches, 119.

  to downright trepanning was employed by the crimping houses to complete the contractors' quotas. As the poor and uneducated were the most affected the outcry against these abuses soon culminated in riots. In January, 1795, one in St. George's Fields led to the discovery of several young men in irons in a house near the Elephant and Castle, where they had been decoyed by prostitutes. A few weeks later indignation was aroused by the report that two famous pugilists, Mendoza and Ward, were employed by similar establishments in St. George's Fields. In the summer a crowd gutted a notorious house at Charing Cross and, after filling the roadway in front of Northumberland House with mattress feathers, marched to Downing Street to break Pitt's windows.

  The transformation of the least military country in Europe into an armed camp was carried out with all the formless improvisation dear to the national character. There was no logic in the pattern of the new army. Regulars, Militia, Fencibles, Yeomanry, Foreign Auxiliaries and every species of Volunteer corps competed with one another in a baffling mosaic of scarlet and blue. A visitor to Birmingham found twenty recruiting parties drumming and trumpeting away against one another on behalf of their rival units. Their terms of service were as variegated as their uniforms. Many, rai
sed privately and loosely disciplined, were of the most unmilitary appearance: John Byng, passing the Cambridgeshire Militia on the march, noted that their order was that of a flock of sheep and that most of the officers followed in post-chaises.

  Many out of patriotism, or to avoid the annual Militia ballot, joined the Volunteers. For members of this force were exempted from Militia service if they could produce a certificate showing they had attended exercises punctually during the six weeks before the hearing of the Militia list appeals. They were raised locally, generally in small independent companies for use in case of invasion or in aid of the civil power. They appealed mainly to the better-to-do classes: the Rutland Volunteers began with a meeting of a hundred and fifty noblemen, gentlemen and yeomen who bound themselves to attend when called upon under a £50 penalty, and chose a uniform of French grey and buff.1

  In the yeomanry regiments there was always a great resort of

  1Times, 21st April, 1794.

  farmers. The daughter of one recalled what a treat it was for the children when the day for exercise came round. " What polishing of sword and epaulette! What brushing of bearskin and broadcloth ! With what admiration we used to walk round my father when he was fully equipped, and he affecting all the time to take it as a mere matter of course'1

  Wherever one went one saw uniforms, their bright primary colours adding a new charm to the soft half-tones of the English background. The traveller at his inn found his landlord a local Fencible, eager to show off his arms and charger, or was woken at five in the morning to the sound of trumpets. High on the lonely fells, MacRitchie, the Clunie minister, met Lord Darlington's Dragoons on their way to Penrith, mounted on bay horses and clad in scarlet cloaks with yellow facings: the Government moved its cavalry like shuttlecocks up and down the country.2

  More than 40,000 recruits were raised in the spring and summer of 1794. The chaos produced by such rapid military expansion was indescribable. One immediate effect was an almost complete stoppage of naval recruitment. At Perth, early in 1795, as much as 25 guineas a man was offered without producing a single seaman.3 The Government was forced to place an embargo on all merchant shipping for six weeks until 20,000 seamen had been impressed, and later had to suspend Army recruiting altogether. Before the Fleet could be manned, no less than fifteen regiments were drafted on board.

  Into this martial hodgepodge came in February, 1795, that erstwhile apprentice of Frederick the Great, the Duke of York. His appointment to the vacant office of Commander-in-Chief at the Horse Guards was made solely out of deference to Royal wishes to soften his recall from Flanders. But by a happy chance the Duke was a born administrator—a hard worker with an orderly mind, a royal memory and a mastery of detail, who had acquired a firsthand knowledge of the deficiencies and needs of the Army. Without a trace of genius, he was single-hearted in his devotion to the Service and—unlike his brothers—a gentleman. The Army never had a more useful patron.

  1 Ham, MS.

  2 Torrington, IV, 59 ; MacRitchie, 19, 21.

  3 MacRitchie, 1.

  It needed one. Beyond native courage and tenacity and a great regimental tradition the Army of 1795 possessed few assets. Its discipline was defective, its equipment inferior and inadequate, and its methods of supply and recruitment were anarchical. The Duke's work was to give it organisation: to do for Britain on a smaller and more leisurely scale what Carnot had done for France. During the next decade he forged the weapon which Moore and Wellington were to use. In the direction of the armies in the field he had no part: it was not his metier. That remained the business of the politicians, who, with Dundas in the Secretary of State's office, Windham in the old War Department and Huskisson as Under-Secretary-of-State, maintained a kind of all-party, and sometimes mutually contradictory, direction of military operations. The Duke had merely to put the forces they misused into the field: to officer, train and equip them.

  He wasted no time. Early in March, 1795, he issued a circular letter demanding a return of all captains under 12 and lieutenant-colonels under 20. The first need was to restore the vanished prestige and discipline of the commissioned ranks by ending the scandal of juvenile command which improvising statesmen had introduced to raise cheap recruits. Promotion by purchase the Duke could not abolish, for it was a long-established national institution—almost as much part of an Englishman's birthright as the devolution of landed property. But what he could and did do was to insist on fitness for command in the field. He initiated a system of returns and confidential reports that enabled his adviser, the Adjutant-General, to test the history and capacity of every officer in the Service. And by being readily accessible and appointing a Military Secretary as the official channel of communication between himself and all ranks, he put a check on the fatal habit of political interference in matters of discipline and promotion.

  In the sphere of training his germinating work was equally valuable. Detailed orders were issued for the exercise of troops in camp: Mondays and Fridays were allocated to battalion drill, Tuesdays and Thursdays to brigade training, Wednesdays to field-days. The Army was given system and direction. Time was necessary to attain results: conservatism was strong and the anomalies of the English administrative system were too many to be modified or removed quickly. The artillery still continued to be directed by the Ordnance Board—an independent body which, despite the removal of the Duke of Richmond and the substitution of the formidable Lord Cornwallis, remained a by-word for unpunctuality and inefficiency. But the Duke's steady hand brought a slow but solid improvement of method into every department of the Service. Without it the new Army would have been still-born.

  All this strengthening of the armed forces—essential now if Britain was to survive—made ever greater demands on the country's purse. By the modest standards of the eighteenth century the cost of the war was terrific. A ship of the line cost nearly £100,000 to build, and Britain had to keep at sea a force of more than a hundred of them as well as several thousand small craft. The yards were always full of vessels under construction, and shipwrights' wages under the stress of demand rose to more than twice those of agricultural labourers. With something approaching half a million men to pay, feed and equip in every part of the world, Pitt's capacity as a financier was sternly taxed.

  The Prime Minister, educated in the new and, to an eighteenth-century mind, enthralling principles of Adam Smith, and given supreme office while almost a boy to save a war-racked country from financial ruin, remained unshakably convinced that the defeat of France would be achieved through the economic strength of Britain. In the short run he was tragically wrong: ultimately, in the course of a long war of attrition, he was proved right. He therefore husbanded the country's resources and placed the burden, whenever possible, not on the backs of his own over-strained generation but on those of a more peaceful posterity, believing that the foundations of the commercial wealth he had laid would ultimately make it seem light. In this also he was wrong in the short run, right in the long. His vast borrowings crippled the post-war generation and poisoned British social life for three decades with a sense of bitterness and frustration. Yet the nightmare of debt presently paled in the dawn of Victorian industrial expansion, and was forgotten.

  At the time the taxes imposed to balance Pitt's war-budgets seemed to our ancestors heavy enough. For they fell on almost every article of purchase or hire from playing cards to stage coaches. Imports, both of raw materials and manufactures, paid duties up to 30 or 40 per cent, and the price of foreign foods, some of them now common necessities, rose to almost prohibitive levels. A budget day cartoon portrayed John Bull giving up his breeches to save his bacon, while a peering Pitt cried, " More money! John: more money to defend you from the bloody and cannibal French! They're a-coming! Why they'll strip you to the very skin! " Yet the basis of taxation remained indirect: the freeman's right of choice to be taxed as he pleased survived. Even in the hour of national danger the individual was encouraged to earn as much as he could, spend the mone
y in his own way and, if possible, grow rich. For it was Adam Smith's and therefore Pitt's belief that a nation of many rich men was a rich nation.

  The price of passing on the burden was made heavier than it need have been. The science of raising money on public credit, though far ahead of that prevailing on the Continent, was still only partially developed: the money market a close one and in a few hands. The big bankers and loan-mongers exacted a grossly unfair toll on the nation for their services. Pitt's intention—a sound one—had been to float loans at par. But the bankers and their new rivals, the Jewish stock-jobbers, at first refused to touch anything but three per cents. These they absorbed at a huge discount which posterity was compelled to make good. In the opening year of war for every £100 borrowed, £138 of stock was created. In 1796, though the rate of interest had risen to 4 per cent, bonds of £100 had to be given to the money monopolists for every £60 advanced. Borrowing as no Minister in any country had ever borrowed before, Pitt in a few years doubled the national debt.

  Had the nation in its hour of need assumed a direct control of its own credit instead of allowing it to become the monopoly of the professional moneylender, Britain's history in the next century might have been happier. But to have done so would have required a revolution in men's ideas and a resort to first principles alien to the pragmatic English mind. An Englishman in difficulties always went to the "Jews "—the ever improvident leader of the Opposition called his ante-chamber Jerusalem—and the nation did the same. The result was not only the rapid rise of a powerful moneyed class, which had as yet only imperfectly absorbed the national tradition, but a gradual disintegration of established standards, values and ways of life. Fox's criticism of Pitt's war finance that it turned a nation of sturdy peasants and squires into fundholders, industrialists and paupers was not wholly factious. It has been forgotten by posterity as much as it was by his own contemporaries that the great Whig in his seemingly treasonable opposition to the war was animated not so much by sympathy with French principles as by deep love of an abiding England which he felt was jeopardised by more than Jacobins. Like Cobbett after him he was haunted by a vague fear of the growth of something sinister: the indefinable "IT" of the radical yeoman's angry jargon.