The Years of Endurance

by Arthur Bryant

  peculiar achievement, and with it the great finance Minister stood or fell. For some time his strength had mainly lain in the lack of any one to replace him: he had many bitter enemies and few friends. In November his coach was stoned and hooted by a mob, and he seriously confided to Wilberforce that were he to resign his head would be off in six weeks.

  For Pitt was showing signs of strain. He was now just on thirty-eight and had been Prime Minister continuously for thirteen years, the last four in time of war and national peril. He felt acutely the solitude of his place, was often impatient, particularly with his critics in Parliament, and was much troubled by headaches. Early in the New Year—though only a few knew it—he had deliberately turned his back on what seemed his greatest hope of happiness. During his occasional visits to his Kentish home, Holwood, he fell in love with the eldest daughter of his neighbour, Lord Auckland. A lovely, vivacious girl of twenty, Eleanor Eden, naturally flattered, returned his attentions, and the Edens and Pitt's few close friends looked forward to a new and serener era in his life.

  But on January 20th Pitt wrote a letter to Auckland renouncing all hope of claiming his daughter's hand. He gave no reasons, but the shocking state of his finances was the probable cause. Absorbed in public work, he had long left all private business to servants who made the housekeeping bills at Downing Street and Holwood a bottomless pit of debt. Recently his mother and brother had made heavy drafts on his limited purse. A poor man, almost entirely dependent on his official salary, he refused like his father to use his official position to enrich himself. He even refused a modest place to his prospective father-in-law which would have provided a portion for his bride. In an age in which a certain display was regarded as an essential part of a public man's equipment, he chose to remain a bachelor because marriage with the women he loved would have compelled him either to retire or to stoop to a form of theft from his country which all the world but he practised.

  But the act of repudiation seemed to shrivel his frail body. Thereafter he became even more solitary than before. At council meetings in February it was noted that his face looked swollen and unhealthy. His foes rejoiced and even his friends complained at his want of energy.1 The Bank crisis was made the occasion of a full-

  1 Farington I, 194.

  dress attack on him in the House: two days after the suspension of cash payments the Opposition carried eighty-six members into the lobbies. " We have too long had a confiding House of Commons," Fox declared, " I want now an inquiring House of Commons." The City Common Hall even passed a resolution to address the King to remove his Ministers. There was talk of a new Government under Lord Moira, excluding " all persons on either side who had made themselves obnoxious to the public."

  From this trough of depression Pitt was raised by great tidings. On the evening of March 3 rd news reached London of a naval victory against Spain. For a moment the clouds of that terrible winter parted. Through them men saw the gleam of something swift and glorious, and of a new name—Nelson.

  The victory which had come so unexpectedly was owing in the first place to Sir John Jervis. After a visit to Portugal to reanimate its despairing government and refit his storm-battered fleet, he had left Lisbon on January 18 th, 1797, with eleven ships of the line. He had refused to remain there a day longer than necessary: " inaction in the Tagus," he wrote, " will make us all cowards." The bad luck which had dogged the tough old man for the past two months still held, for as he left the estuary one of his only two three-deckers went aground. This, his fifth casualty since the great gale of December 10th, reduced his fleet to ten. Nevertheless, though he knew that close on thirty Spanish ships of the line were expected off Cadiz on their way from the Mediterranean to Brest, he never faltered. After escorting a Brazil-bound convoy into the Atlantic, he beat back through winter storms to his chosen station off Cape St. Vincent. Here he waited for the enemy and for the battle which he was resolved should determine the fate of Britain.

  Meanwhile the man of destiny who was fated to be England's answer to Napoleon was almost boyishly challenging danger in the abandoned Mediterranean. On December 15th, 1796, Commodore Nelson had sailed from Gibraltar with two frigates to evacuate troops and stores from Elba. Off Cartagena, the main Spanish base, he fell in with two enemy frigates and at once engaged them, capturing one. He reached Porto Ferrajo on the evening of Christmas Day, just in time to escort the erstwhile Betsey Wynne, npw united to his friend Captain Fremantle, to a ball where he was received by the delighted British colony—who were feeling a little isolated—to the strains of " Rule Britannia." On January 29th, 1797, he sailed again to rejoin Jervis.

  Two days later the Spanish fleet, twenty-seven battleships and twelve large frigates, left Cartagena for the Atlantic. Their orders were to join the French at Brest and, sweeping the Channel and North Sea with their joint forces—greater than anything Britain could assemble—escort an army of invasion from Holland to Ireland. They passed the Straits on February 5th, and Nelson, who reached Gibraltar four days later, was forced to sail right through them as they battled with the unwonted Atlantic gales. While closely pursued by two Spanish battleships, one of his men fell overboard and his First Lieutenant, Hardy, lowered a boat and went to the rescue. To save him, Nelson, checking the course of his ship, risked almost certain destruction. But the Spaniards, bewildered by their tiny prey's unaccountable conduct, checked too, and Nelson got away. Next day he rejoined Jervis off Cape St. Vincent, and hoisted his Commodore's pennant in the Captain, 74.

  That night the two fleets drew near. The Spaniards were ignorant of Jervis's presence, but he, shadowing them with his frigates, was well aware of theirs. The night was misty and the Spanish ships, strung out over many miles of sea, fell into confusion, puncturing the silence with minute guns. At 5 o'clock on February 14th —St. Valentine's Day—they were sighted fifteen miles to the south-west: "thumpers," as the signal-lieutenant of the Barfleur reported, "looming like Beachy Head in a fog! " Jervis had been reinforced a week before by five ships from England, but he was outnumbered by nearly two to one. Of his fifteen capital ships only two carried 100 guns, while of the Spanish twenty-seven, seven were three-deckers with 112 guns or more, one of them —the four-decker Santissima Trinidad—the largest fighting ship in the world. Yet Jervis was determined to force a battle. For he knew that a victory at that moment was essential to his country.

  But Jervis was no gambler. He had reckoned the odds carefully: he knew the strength of the Spanish fleet but he also knew its figbting capacity. He possessed in a supreme degree that comprehensive common sense and balance which, with clarity of decision and endurance, are the chief attributes of a master of war.

  Defeat would spell disaster to England but so would failure to engage. As the mist lifted and the flag-lieutenant called out the odds, he remained grimly unperturbed. " There are eighteen sail of the line, Sir John." " Very well, sir."—" There are twenty sail of the line, Sir John." " Very well, sir."—" There are twenty-five sail of the line, Sir John." "Very well, sir."—"There are twenty-seven sail of the line, Sir John; near double our own." " If there are fifty sail of the line, I will go through them."—" That's right, Sir John," cried the giant Canadian, Captain Hallowell, in his enthusiasm actually slapping his Admiral on the back, " and a damned good licking we'll give them! "

  In two columns, imperceptibly merging into an impenetrable line with sterns and bowsprits almost touching, the British fleet bore down on the enemy, making straight for a gap—nearly three miles wide—between the main force and a straggling division to leeward. It was like the inexorable thrust of a sword into a lanky giant's careless guard. The Spanish Admiral made a gallant effort to close it, but too late. The Principe de Asturias—a three-decker of 112 guns —tried to break through to join the severed squadron, only to encounter the Victory's broadside and drift out of the fight with tattered sails and splintered topmasts. Then with the Culloden leading, Jervis turned into the wind, his ships tacking in turn and meeting the Spanish li
ne on a parallel course. " Look at Troubridge," he remarked with triumph suffusing his stern countenance as the Culloden went into action, " he handles his ship as if the eyes of all England were upon him! "

  Down in the dark of the gun decks and in the " slaughter houses " near the mainmasts, the men waited with the precision born of long practice. As each enemy drew alongside and all was ready—the ports open, matches lighted, the guns run out—they broke into three tremendous cheers more daunting to their foes even than the thunder of the broadsides. " We gave them their Valentines in style," wrote one of the gunners of the Goliath; " not that we loved fighting, but we all wished to be free to return to our homes and follow our own pursuits. We knew there was no other way of obtaining this than by defeating the enemy. * The hotter war, the sooner peace,' was a saying with us." 1

  The climax of the battle came at about one o'clock.

  1 Long, 193.

  At that moment the head of the Spanish line was nearing the tail of the British. Nelson, flying his flag in the thirteenth ship in the British line, saw with the instinct of genius that only one thing could prevent the main Spanish division, which had suddenly turned to leeward, from rejoining its isolated ships and so confronting Jervis with a reunited fleet before he could alter course. The Spaniards were battered but they were still intact: another few minutes and the chance of the decisive victory that England needed would have passed.

  Without hesitation, disregarding the letter of the orders he had received and anticipating those there was no time to transmit,. Nelson bore out of the line and placed the Captain—the smallest two-decker in the British fleet—straight in the course of the giant Santissima Trinidad and four other ships. For ten minutes it looked as though the Captain, her foremast shot away and her wheelpost broken in a tornado of fire, would be blown out of the water. But when the smoke cleared she was still there, and the Excellent under Captain Collingwood was coming to her aid. The Spaniards' line was in inextricable confusion, all hope of a junction between their sundered divisions at an end and Jervis beating back into the fight with the remainder of his fleet.

  But before the victory was complete, Nelson had done a very remarkable thing. Crippled though she was from her duel with the Santissima Trinidad, he placed the Captain alongside the 8o-gun San Nicolas and prepared to board. Helped by a soldier of the 69th, the one-eyed Commodore climbed through the quarter-gallery window in her stern and led his boarders in person through the officers' cabins to the quarter-deck. Here he found Captain Berry, who had jumped into the enemy's mizen chains, already in possession of the poop and hauling down the Spanish Ensign. At that moment fire was opened on the boarding party from the stern-gallery of the three-decker, San Josef, which in the confusion of the fight had drifted against the San Nicolas. Placing sentries at the tops of the ladders of his still scarcely vanquished prize, Nelson directed his boarding party up the side of the San Josef There, as his friend Collingwood described it, on the quarter-deck of a Spanish first-rate he received the swords of the officers of the two ships, " while one of his sailors bundled them up with as much composure as he would have made a faggot, though twenty-two of their line were still within gunshot." 1 Presently the Victory, now in the thick of the fight again, passed that triumphant group on the San Josef's quarter-deck, saluting with three cheers. The cool daring of the thing tickled the imagination of the Fleet: " Nelson's patent bridge for boarding first-rates " was for long the admiring joke of the lower-deck. In the English mode, it rivalled Bonaparte's feat at the Bridge of Arcola.

  Four battleships, two of them first-rates, remained in the victors' hands. The Spanish fleet, still superior in numbers, withdrew under cover of night to Cadiz, bearing wounds that freed Britain from serious danger in that quarter for many months. Imperial Spain had been proved the insubstantial wraith the Navy had always believed it to be: the dreaded junction between the French and Spanish fleets a dream. The nation when it heard the news felt a quickening of its pulse: it was reminded what British courage and resolution could do. The Government, saved at the eleventh hour, showered rewards on the principal commanders: Jervis became Earl St. Vincent with a parliamentary pension of £3000 a year, the Vice- and Rear-Admirals were made Baronets, and another subordinate Admiral soon afterwards became an Irish peer. But the real hero of the day was the till then unknown Commodore who was created a Knight of the Bath: his sudden exploit caught England's imagination. Fretful in inaction and querulous under neglect, Nelson was happier than he had ever been, " rich in the praises of every man from the highest to the lowest in the fleet."2 For all men knew him now for what he was. That knowledge was the measure of his opportunity. The years of testing and obscurity were over, the sunrise gates of fulfilment opening before him.

  1 Collingwood, 39.

  2 Nicolas, II, 359.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Fleet in Mutiny 1797

  " The able seamen of the fleet ... are the bnly description of men now serving his Majesty whose situation by common' exercise of their trade could be bettered fourfold if they were released from the service of their country." Captain Packenham to Earl Spencer 11th Dec, 1796.

  " If there is, indeed; a rot in the Wooden walls of old England, our decay cannot be very'distant ..."

  R.B.Sheridan.

  NELSON had appeared on the horizon at the very moment that the Corporate force; he embodied was contending with powers which almost seemed too great for it. That force was the Navy, which had made its entry on the world stage under Drake and the great Elizabethans had sunk into imigriificance under the early Stuarts, revived1 under Cromwell and the second Charles to wrest the imperial sceptre of commerce from Holland and, given administrative discipline by the life-long labours of Pepys, had remained throughout the eighteenth century the principal arbiter of human affairs at sea. Yet its ascendancy had never been undisputed. For over a hundred years monarchical France, with its greater population and resources, had contended with Britain for the command of the sea and on more than one occasion had all but attained it. Britain's danger had been greatest when France and the Atlantic empire of Spain had joined hands against her: then, as during the American War and now in 1797 their fleets had been outnumbered arid she had had to fight for her very existence.

  But Britain had always triumphed because in the last resort the sea was her whole being, whereas with her Continental rivals it was only a secondary consideration. " The thing which lies nearest the heart of this nation," Charles II had written a century before, "

  Is trade and all that belongs to it." Being an island her commerce was maritime and its protection an essential interest of an ever-growing number of her people. They were ready to make sacrifices for the Navy which they would never have done for the Army or any other service of the Crown. For it was on the Navy, as the Articles of War put it, that under the Providence of God the safety, honour, and welfare of the realm depended.

  Because of these things the Navy touched mystic chords in the English heart which went deeper than reason. The fair sails of a frigate at sea, the sight of a sailor with tarry breeches and rolling gait in any inland town, and that chief of all the symbolic spectacles of England, the Grand Fleet lying at anchor in one of her white-fringed roadsteads, had for her people the power of a trumpet call. So little Byam Martin, seeing for the first time the triple-tiered ships of the line lying in Portsmouth harbour, remained " riveted to the spot, perfectly motionless, so absorbed in wonder " that he would have stayed there all day had not his hosts sent a boat's crew to fetch him away. From that hour his mind was " inflamed with the wildest desire to be afloat." 1 Bobby Shafto going to sea with silver buckles on his knee was an eternal theme of eighteenth-century England: of such stuff were Admirals made.

  They had a hard schooling. Flung like Nelson at twelve into an unfamiliar world of kicks and cuffs, crowded hammocks and icy hardships, or after a few months under " Black Pudding," the omnipresent horsewhip of the Naval Academy, Gosport, apprenticed as midshipmen to the cockpit
of a man-of-war, they learnt while still children to be Spartans, dined off scrubbed boards on salt beef, sauerkraut and black-strap, and became complete masters before they were men of a wonderful technical skill in all that appertained to the sailing and fighting of ships.

  They were as inured to roughness and salt water as gulls to wind. Boys in their teens would spend days afloat in the maintop, ready at any moment to clamber to the masthead when topgallant or studding sail needed setting or taking in. They grew up like bulldogs, delighting to cuff and fight: in some ships it was the practice while the officers were dining in the wardroom for the midshipmen to engage regularly in pitched battles on the quarter-deck, Romans against Trojans, for the possession of the poop, banging away, " all

  1 Martin, I, 4.

  in good part," with broomsticks, handswabs, boarding pikes and even muskets. Midshipman Gardner of the Edgar, being pinked in the thigh by a comrade with a fixed bayonet in the course of one of these friendly scraps, retaliated by putting a small quantity of powder into a musket and firing at his assailant, marking " his phiz " for life.1 So toughened, they faced the world on their toes ready for anything and everyone. Such were the high-spirited midshipmen who pelted the British Ambassador with plums at the Carnival at Pisa and, as he looked angry, hove another volley at his lady, observing that she seemed better tempered than his Excellency.2