The decisive battles of the War of the Spanish Succession were fought on land by the armies directed by John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough. Most of the men he commanded, whether British, Dutch or German, were paid for by Britain which, in 1711, had 171,000 men on its payroll. British seapower alone paid a peripheral part in this conflict which was marked by no decisive, full-scale fleet actions. Nevertheless, in terms of the future use of the navy, the war provided useful lessons and experience.
From the beginning, British strategy aimed at the elimination of Franco–Spanish power in the Mediterranean. This required the acquisition of a naval base in the region so that men-o’-war could be armed, victualled and overhauled without having to sail back to ports in Britain. To this end, Gibraltar was occupied and held in the teeth of a Franco–Spanish counterattack (1702–04) and Minorca, with its deep-water harbour at Port Mahon, was seized in 1708. Both acquisitions were of tremendous importance, for British fleets could now be permanently stationed in the Mediterranean and British political influence exerted over its small maritime states.
As a token of Britain’s new position in this area, Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell’s fleet cruised in the western Mediterranean in 1703 to demonstrate to local rulers that Britain was now a force to be reckoned with. One, the Duke of Savoy, was so impressed that he changed sides and joined the Grand Alliance.5 The intimidatory value of a fleet was quickly appreciated. In 1708 the Duke of Manchester, Queen Anne’s ambassador to Venice, commenting on the uncooperative attitude of the Pope, observed, ‘I wish our fleet would make him a visit, that he may know what a Queen of Great Britain is.’ Such a show was hardly needed; in 1705 Barcelona was occupied after an amphibious landing, and three years later a similar attack on Toulon did severe damage to the French fleet anchored there.
These enterprises were part of a larger strategy, warmly endorsed by Marlborough, by which France was driven to split her land forces to counter threats in southern Europe, including an invasion of Spain itself by an army under Lord Peterborough. His campaign, like Wellington’s a century later, could not have been sustained without the Royal Navy’s domination of the Atlantic and Mediterranean.
Beyond European waters, the Royal Navy undertook a number of small-scale operations against French and Spanish shipping and colonies with mixed results. A small squadron, under the command of Vice-Admiral John Benbow, a determined and courageous officer, cruised in the West Indies and severely mauled a French flotilla in a six-day engagement off Santa Marta in April 1702. Following what would become Nelson’s dictum that an officer who attacked his adversary without hesitation could do no wrong, Benbow took the offensive, but was deserted by four of his seven subordinate commanders. Towards the end of the action, his right leg was shattered by chain shot, but he remained on his quarterdeck in a hastily constructed cradle and continued to direct the fighting. He died some months later from fever, having had his leg amputated. Two of his cowardly officers were subsequently court-martialled and shot, while Benbow lived on in a popular ballad as a golden example of the tenacity, sense of duty and fighting spirit that Britain expected from its sailors:
Brave Benbow lost his legs by chain shot, by chain shot,
Brave Benbow lost his legs by chain shot.
Brave Benbow lost his legs,
But on his stumps he begs,
‘Fight on, my English lads, ’tis our lot, ’tis our lot.’
Benbow’s virtues were also displayed by Rear-Admiral Sir Charles Wager, who encountered a Spanish treasure fleet off Porto Bello in May 1708. Abandoned by two timorous commanders, he went straight for the enemy and, firing broadsides at close range, sank one battleship that was stuffed with bullion and crippled another. A representation of the battle, carved in marble, was later set on his flamboyant tomb in Westminster Abbey.
Wager’s destruction of the bullion ships, like the seizure of another treasure fleet at Vigo on the Portuguese coast in 1703 (some of the captured silver was used to mint coins which were stamped ‘Vigo’), hampered the Franco-Spanish war effort. What was too easily forgotten by the Allies, who naturally celebrated such coups, was that nearly all the convoys of precious metals from Spanish America did reach their destination. Even so, it was clear by 1710 that the two sides were evenly matched on land and that France, thrown back on the defensive and close to bankruptcy, had been fought to a standstill.
In Britain a new, Tory ministry adopted a strategy which, it was imagined, would bring the country advantages in the form of conquered French colonies. Successful amphibious attacks were made on French settlements in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. A more ambitious project to capture Quebec in 1711 went awry because of careless planning and ignorance of the fogs and shoals of the St Lawrence River.
Peace was made in 1714 at Utrecht where France recognised continued Spanish independence. Britain was rewarded with Gibraltar and Minorca, confirming her ascendancy in the Mediterranean, and Nova Scotia and the grant of the asiento, an official licence that permitted one ship a year to trade with the Spanish American colonies. The war had marked Britain’s coming of age as a European and a global power, a status which owed everything to her fleet of 124 ships, nearly twice the strength of the combined Franco–Spanish navies. While her adversaries and the Dutch had been debilitated by twelve years of conflict, British overseas trade had actually increased. This achievement had been in large part the result of the 1708 Cruisers and Convoys Act which bound the navy to allocate warships to protect merchantmen against privateers and commerce raiders, a duty which, by the close of the war, occupied two-thirds of the navy’s strength.
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From 1714 to 1739 Britain and its colonies enjoyed a period of peace, domestic tranquillity and economic growth. Relations with France were outwardly cordial, but many Frenchmen were deeply apprehensive about the scope of Britain’s global ambitions. ‘The financial power of the English … gets every day larger and more ambitious,’ observed a French official in 1733, seemed poised to extinguish his country’s own expanding trade. Commercial competition between the two nations was therefore keen, in particular in North America, the Caribbean and on the east coast of India, where France was extending its network of trading posts, much to the alarm of the East India Company.
It was Spanish high-handedness rather than fears of French enterprise which led to war in November 1739. For the past five years, the Spanish authorities in America had been cracking down on what, with good reason, they considered abuses of the asiento contract by British merchants. The attempts of the guada-costas (customs officers) to stem the flow of contraband led to violent incidents when British ships were boarded, searched and, in many cases, their captains and cargoes arrested. Most famously, one zealous guarda-costa sliced off the ear of Captain Jenkins of the Rebecca and suggested that he took the organ to George II in language that was too coarse to be repeated in the Commons. When MPs debated this and other outrages in March 1739, the mercantile interest clamoured for war. They claimed that Britain’s entire transatlantic commerce would be ruined unless Spain was taught a sharp lesson.
National pride had been bruised and one member contrasted ‘The mean Submission of Great Britain’ with ‘the triumphant pride, and stubborn Haughtiness of Spain’.
There was a broad principle at stake according to William Pitt, the future prime minister. ‘It is vain to negotiate and make treaties’, he argued, ‘if there is not Dignity and Vigour to enforce the observance of them.’6 It was clear, at least from the perspective of the Commons chamber, that Spain had failed to uphold her obligations to Britain and therefore needed to be reminded of them in a way that would deter any future backsliding. The navy was the obvious means of bringing home to Spain the folly of meddling with British trade. The doctrine of the corrective use of seapower which later, and after many applications, would be known as gunboat diplomacy was born. Most of the war party were unconcerned with the surgical use of seapower to punish Spain; they wanted a rerun of the campaigns of Drake an
d Morgan with warships returning to British ports crammed with the silver and gold of the Spanish Indies. Drawing attention to the presence of large numbers of army and naval officers among those calling for war, Henry Pelham, the MP for Sussex who became prime minister in 1744, tartly recalled how, in the last war, ‘the Officers and Sailors were the Gainers, but the public was not’.7 He was probably right; the lure of prize money was as strong as the urge to uphold national prestige.
Despite the misgivings of the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, the war lobby and its extra-parliamentary supporters in the press and London coffee houses got their way. A war, begun in anger, resolved itself into a series of blows delivered randomly against Spain’s empire and trade.
Almost immediately war had been formally declared, Admiral Edward Vernon, who as an MP had called for the overrunning and occupation of Spain’s American empire, took command of a fleet under orders to harry Spanish trade and colonies in the Caribbean. What was in effect a war of smash-and-grab raids opened on an encouraging note with the capture of Porto Bello. Further attacks were launched against Cartagena (on the coast of modern Colombia, Havana and Santiago de Cuba during the next two years, but were bloodily repelled. By the end of 1742 hopes of quick, profitable victories had evaporated.
From the start, British strategy had been flawed. To have any chance of success, assaults on Spanish strongholds in the Americas required their isolation, which could only be achieved by a blockade of Spain’s Atlantic ports. Operational difficulties, most notably the inadequate base facilities at Gibraltar, prevented the Mediterranean fleet from stopping the flow of reinforcements and munitions from Spain to its colonies.
Climate and disease also played their part in frustrating the Caribbean adventure. Tobias Smollett, a surgeon’s mate during the siege of Cartagena in 1741, described the action in his novel The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748). He drew a brutally realistic picture of the miseries suffered by ordinary soldiers and seamen, in particular their diet:
… our provision of putrid salt beef, to which the sailors gave the name of Irish horse; salt pork of New England, which, though neither flesh nor fish, savoured of both; bread from the same country, every biscuit whereof, like a piece of clockwork, moved by its own internal impulse, occasioned by myriads of insects that dwelt within it; and butter served out by the gill that tasted like train-oil thickened with salt.
The North American colonies were clearly doing well from the war. To noisome victuals were added the torments of the weather, and what proved to be the final blow for the ill-fed sailors came with the onset of the West Indian rainy season which:
… conspired with the stench that surrounded us, the heat of the climate, our own constitutions impoverished by bad provisions, and our despair to introduce bilious fever among us, which raged with such violence, that three-fourths of those whom it invaded died in a deplorable manner.
Fatal illnesses, of which scurvy was the commonest, killed the same proportion of the crews of Admiral Sir George Anson’s flotilla during its four-year cruise around the world between 1740 and 1744. Anson, an extremely able and intelligent commander, had been ordered to intercept Spanish shipping off the western shores of South and Central America. He returned in his one surviving ship, HMS Centurion, with £1,250,000 worth of plunder, nearly half of it taken from the Manila galleon which had been captured off the Philippines.
By the time that Anson reached Portsmouth, the war against Spain had become a general European conflict in which Britain, the Netherlands and Austria were fighting Spain, France and Prussia. The perilous military situation in Flanders and the need to defend George II’s province of Hanover demanded a large commitment of British troops to the continent. There was a further call on manpower in 1745, when Prince Charles Edward (the ‘Young Pretender’), backed by French troops and cash, landed in Scotland. The last Jacobite insurrection was a desperate gamble from start to end; the Prince’s only substantial support lay in the Highlands of Scotland, where, after an excursion as far south as Derby, his army was cornered and overcome at Culloden in April 1746. Throughout the campaign he had been denied further French assistance by the Royal Navy.
The Jacobite uprising, which caused some temporary and highly exaggerated alarm in England and the Lowlands of Scotland, was a distraction from a war where France was now identified as the main enemy. A methodical strategy was evolved, aimed at the extinction of her overseas trade and the occupation of her settlements in North America. A squadron of men-o’-war was also despatched to assist the East India Company in its miniature campaign against French enclaves on the Coromandel coast and to interrupt France’s Asian commerce.
In February 1745. two ships of the line, the Deptford and Preston, fell in with and took three French vessels returning from China as they sailed through the Sunda Straits. There was general rejoicing on both men-o’-war at the prospect of prize money beyond the dreams of even the most avaricious naval officer. One, Henry Clerk of the Preston, spoke for all in a hurried letter to his parents in Scotland, which was delivered to a passing Dutch East Indiaman for the first stage of its journey. He also gave them an uncomfortable reminder that the pursuit of easy wealth in the tropics had its drawbacks too:
We have had very good luck since we came to this country, having taken three French China ships at one time Richly laden, but alas I wish I could say so much for my Health for I have been sick since I came round the Cape [of Good Hope]. I hope the three prizes will be able to support me for some time … or God grant me my health. I believe my Prize money will amount to 3 × 4,000 Pounds sterling and a little more luck will be sufficient to buy a little estate somewhere near Cramond.8
In America, the war opened with a successful attack on Cape Breton Island at the mouth of the St Lawrence and the capture of Fort Louisbourg in 1745 by a force which included a 4,000-strong New England volunteer contingent. Within a few months, preparations were in hand to establish a naval base at Fort Louisbourg which would serve as a springboard for amphibious operations against Quebec.9 These had to be abandoned when a French relief force arrived the following year.
The setback in Canada, like those in the Caribbean, exposed the need for a global naval strategy. Before any offensive could be mounted in America it was essential that the French or, for that matter, the Spanish were in no position to send reinforcements to their colonies. To guarantee this quarantine, the Royal Navy would either have to bottle up its adversaries’ fleets in their home ports or engage them as soon as they emerged. A blockade required constant patrols, an activity that caused enormous wear and tear to hulls, masts, spars and sails, not to mention crews. By 1745, a system had been adopted by which a ship undertook a fixed period of duty with the blockading squadron and then returned for refitting, while its place was taken by another which had just been refurbished. This method of maintaining a continual presence in the western Atlantic worked, so long as the Royal Navy could call upon superior numbers of warships and efficiently managed dockyards.
The results of this strategy were highly encouraging. In May 1747, a French squadron attempted to break the blockade and was caught off Cape Finisterre by a larger force under Anson’s command. He had used the past months of watching and waiting to exercise his captains and men in a new battle tactic, known as the general chase. It was a simple manoeuvre which required expert seamanship, discipline and skilled gunnery. The British line-of-battle ships (that is, 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th rates armed with sixty or more cannon) approached their adversaries in line astern. As the leading British battleship came alongside the rearmost French, it fired a broadside and then sailed on, firing in turn at each opposing vessel as it passed along the line. This pattern was repeated by each of the succeeding ships.
This technique worked; six French battleships were sunk or taken by Anson’s squadron. Further proof of the new tactic’s efficacy came in October when Rear-Admiral Sir Edward Hawke engaged a West Indies-bound French squadron, again off Cape Finisterre. Six of the eight F
rench battleships were sunk or taken and the convoy of 250 merchantmen they were escorting was scattered. Many of these were later captured, for Hawke had had the foresight to send a sloop to Port Royal to warn the naval authorities there that a French convoy was heading in their direction.
These two victories vindicated the new strategic formula for isolating France, and the general chase as a battle winner. They were also a sign of the emergence at the top of the navy’s hierarchy of a new breed of senior commander. Anson and Hawke were admirals who were prepared to snatch at whatever opportunity came their way to force a battle, even if this meant taking risks. Both understood that British naval supremacy could only be maintained if individual commanders were willing to get to grips with the enemy’s battlefleets whenever they left port. It was, of course, never possible to predict the outcome of a battle, but both Anson and Hawke rightly believed that the better training, experience, discipline and stamina of their crews would always give them a vital edge over the French.
1747 saw British maritime supremacy preserved. Elsewhere the war had become a stalemate for, while unable to defend their colonies, the French had occupied most of the Austrian Netherlands (modern Belgium). The following year, the exhausted combatants agreed the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle which did little more than restore the pre-war status quo, although Britain had to sacrifice Louisbourg in order to secure the removal of French forces from the Low Countries. Aix-la-Chapelle was, in fact, an armistice and, justifying it to the Commons in 1749, Henry Pelham predicted further conflict with France. Like Rome and Carthage, the two powers were irreconcilable rivals and only the navy could save Britain from the latter’s fate. ‘I am afraid’, he told MPs, ‘we may be taught by experience, that our navy is not invincible; and if that should ever happen our navigation, our commerce, our independency, will be at an end.’9
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire Page 8