by Tom Anderson
Surcouf, for his part, aped Leo Bone at Quiberon. He fled the battle up the Solent while pursued by one of Keppel’s ships, HMS Magician. Surcouf maintained the tactical (if not strategic) skill which had made his legend and managed to sink the Magician, but not before suffering damage to his vessel Consul. Taking on water, again like Leo Bone he drove the ship upon Old Harry’s Rocks near Poole, then evacuated his men to the mainland. Given that this territory was never within the grasp of the English Germanic Republic, exactly how Surcouf managed to survive and later pop up again elsewhere is unknown – some have even suggested the fictitious Crimson Avenger as an explanation, and in truth the situation is inexplicable enough for even that to sound plausible…
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From: “Albion’s Peril: The Invasion of England” by Sir Hubert Pendleton (1951)—
…Churchill’s possibly hopeless mission was redefined in early June 1807, as the advance of the French Republican armies of the English Germanic Republic slowly ground to a halt from lack of resupply and struggling to hold down so much restive territory. The Republic at its maximum extent was thus bounded by the Fens in the north, northern East Anglia in the east, and a line drawn approximately from Bedford through Reading down to Chichester. Although the French sacked Portsmouth, their supply lines were too long and shaky to hold onto the strategic port for long. Fortunately for Churchill’s reputation, they never managed to send more than the occasional tentative raid in the direction of defenceless Oxford.
June however also brought rumours of a new army having landed at Liverpool and marching inland. Those fears were doubled when the rumours spoke of the army being not French, but Irish. The First Glorious Revolution, more than a century before, had been sparked partially thanks to rumours that the King had assembled an army of Papist Irish mercenaries and they were about to march on London. Now it seemed the reality of that fantasy had come.
At about this time, and perhaps it is no coincidence, Edinburgh rose up in the only real internal rebellion of the type Churchill had feared. Scotland’s radicals had always been sidelined, even during the Fox Ministry, and now saw this potentially fatal crippling of England as their moment to act. The short-lived Scottish Celtic Republic, essentially only ever consisting of the city and its environs, was a strange mishmash of the romantic traditionalists who had supported the Jacobites a couple of generations ago and radical extremists such as Thomas Muir, who ended up as Consul of the Republic for about three weeks before being hanged, drawn and quartered. Both sides seemed more concerned about undoing the Act of Union and kicking England while she was down than any coherent ideology, but Churchill naturally painted them as dyed-in-the-wool atheist Jacobin baby-eating traitors. Unwilling to spare regular line troops, Churchill unleashed his own elite Oxfordshire Yeomanry under the command of his eldest son Joshua, Marquess of Blandford, who rapidly earned the enmity of Scots. As well as being compared with “Wullie IV come again”, this is likely where he earned the nickname by which he is known to history: “Bloody Blandford”.
Regardless of the situation in Scotland, this new Irish menace seemed posed to undo the precarious position of the provisional government. Faced with potential attack from both sides, the men of northern Lincolnshire began to contemplate re-flooding the Isle of Axholme as their southern counterparts had with Ely. Churchill hastily assembled his troops under his generals, and several regiments were already moving to take position on the strategic Emley Moor to block the attack from Liverpool when a messenger arrived.
Not just a messenger – Douglas Moore laughed in surprised joy – but his brother Sir John Moore, smiling in triumph. Churchill was astounded and demanded an explanation.
It turned out that the army was indeed mostly Irish, and indeed partly Papist, but all of it was under the command of none other than Richard Wesley, Duke of Mornington and Lord Deputy of the Kingdom of Ireland. It was a testament to Wesley’s hardened skill in governance that he could afford to leave the kingdom as it was and withdraw almost all its troops to defend the nation with which she sat in – often unhappy – personal union. It was also, as the flabbergasted Churchill would later admit, the beginning of the end of Anglo-Irish (and Scots-Irish) enmity. In the face of what followed, what had come before seemed like minor squabbles, childish disputes, to be brushed over.
Furthermore, the Irish were not the only soldiers there. Wesley had brought with him the 79th (New York) Regiment of Foot, along with their legendary sharpshooter Captain James Roosevelt. He had also brought the newly-arrived 101st (West Carolina) Regiment of Foot. In one of the peculiar occurrences in which history can turn on a small thing, the general of the 101st had broken his leg in disembarking from his ship at Liverpool, and the regiment was thrust under the command of the controversial then-Colonel John Alexander. Even in 1807 Alexander raised eyebrows by having his slave Johnson follow him around on the battlefield and reload his hunting rifle for him as he picked off enemy officers. There were English regiments brought over from Ireland as well, but history sadly tends to forget them amid the drama of the moment.
In that instant of dire peril, when the fate of the Kingdom of Great Britain was held in the balance, her sister nations came to the rescue and the crown endured. That was not forgotten. Sometimes it was not remembered in the way that men on that day would have wanted, but it was not forgotten.
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Did you think we’d leave you dying
When this crown should sit over three?
Cheer up, old motherland, the day’s not yet done
And by the night your people shall be free…
- “Three Nations”, traditional rhyme, original author unknown,
version established by Andrew Morse, 1897
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From: “The Latter Jacobin Wars” by James R.V. Donaghue (1962)—
…the second half of 1807 saw the complete collapse of the short-lived English Germanic Republic. British, Irish and American troops united at Fort Rockingham in June as ‘the Grand Army of the Kingdom’ and then proceeded to focus on taking back one county at a time, aided by the local Kleinkrieger movements. The names of the key battles are known to any schoolboy: the Relief of Bedford, the Battle of St Albans, the Descent on Harwich. This latter engagement was led by Major Alexander Cochrane and facilitated by Keppel’s steam fleet, leading to the encirclement and destruction of General Gabin’s core force.
Modigliani in the south proved a more dangerous foe, retreating to London while leaving much of Sussex and Surrey in ruins. Upon hearing of the extent of the collapse on other fronts, he made the decision to try to commandeer boats and take them down the Thames to evacuate the key personnel in the army (i.e., himself) while the remainder fought to defend London.
The personalities collided in the Battle of Islington on November 5th. General Saissons, with the remainder of the EGR’s coherent forces (harried and weakened by Kleinkrieger activity and stripped of the garrison forces that had been taken one at a time by the Grand Army), faced the Duke of Mornington’s mostly Irish and American troops. Meanwhile Sir John Moore swept around in the west with the British troops to retake London from the rear and surround the French from the back. Knowing he was abandoned and betrayed, Saissons fought grimly to the death, knowing he would receive no quarter after what he had been part of. It is said by some admirers of revolutionary ideology that the French fought to the death, which is technically true, but rather avoids the point that they lacked any alternative; no Englishman, and few Irish or Americans, would accept any Republican Frenchman’s surrender after seeing what had become of London.
At the end, Saissons was taken alive and Wesley brought him to Hyde Park, where he elected to choose a method of execution that he had observed while fighting in India in his youth: Saissons was tied bodily across the muzzle of a loaded cannon and blown to smithereens. This was publicly observed by the terrorised, cowed remains of the population of London, who then began naming those members of the Hellfire Club and other collaborationist org
anisations who remained. Wesley, however, realised that there was no way of verifying their claims. On the other hand he could not allow the possibility of letting such traitors go free. Instead he made them prisoners and eventually sent them to the Susan-Mary Penal Colony in America. “The honest Londoner can still make his way in life in such a place,” Wesley later explained his reasoning to Churchill, “while the decadent fifth son who associates with such abominable scum as Dashwood will likely find himself taking his own life after a few months in the open air, far away from cities and opiates.” Though poetic justice, this did not turn out to be entirely true…
…Modigliani’s fleet of little boats sailed past the ruins of the Tilbury Fort and out into the Thames Estuary, where they were surprised to meet a few of Keppel’s steamcraft…
…it is still said by Essexmen that, if you listen on a dark November night while anchored off Canvey Island, you can still hear the tortured shrieks and Italian gibberish of Modigliani as he tries to break free from the icy embrace of Davy Jones…[87]
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From: “Albion’s Peril: The Invasion of England” by Sir Hubert Pendleton (1951)—
…by Christmas Day 1807, the short-lived English Germanic Republic was gone. No Frenchmen remained under arms in England, and if one believes contemporary commentators, no Frenchmen remained alive. For ceremony’s sake more than anything, Richard Burke and the rump Parliament returned to the unhappy ruins of Westminster and staked their claim, then began trying to pick up the pieces. And the military junta really running things, led by by the duo of Marlborough and Mornington (or Churchill and Wesley), turned their attention to other matters.
Albion’s peril was over. England had come the closest to destruction since her last incarnation had been destroyed in the Norman Conquest. But she had survived, just barely. And the Hanoverian crown had held her sister lands together. Now, united in arms against a common foe, they stood upon the cliffs of Dover and looked to the south.
The Duke of Marlborough was never much of a one for quoting scripture, but at a Privy Council meeting on New Years’ Eve, he did mention Ezekiel 25:17 when Frederick Dundas formally tabled the matter of what must come next in this unexpected war. “I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes,” said Churchill, “and they shall know that I am the LORD, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them…”
Chapter #76: The Turn of the Tide
From: “The Jacobin Wars” by E.G. Christie (Hetherington Publishing House, 1926)—
Understanding the causes of the Revolution in France is often cited as one of the most challenging questions to the historian. However, it is readily arguable that understanding the causes of its end presents no less difficult a proposition. How did this unique creation of republican thought, a state which had been ruled by Jacobin revolutionaries for more than a decade – first the terror of Jean-Baptiste Robespierre, then the ideological rigidity of Jean de Lisieux – come to meet its downfall?
It is a problem made all the more obscure by the issue of geography. The multitudinous causes which led France down the dark path in the first place can, nonetheless, cite the compensation that at least all the immediate events of the Revolution took place within a few square miles, Paris and its environs. The collapse of Lisieux’s empire, however, was not decided or fought in any one field. From Doncaster to Cadiz, from Fredericksburg to Moscow, there was scarcely a corner of the globe that did not have its hand upon the flagpole atop the Bastille, hauling down the bloody red flag.
So let us lay the issue of chauvinism[88] on the table and begin close to home. Let us consider the situation in our own island, shocked and smarting from the penetration of her alleged impregnability…
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Still more majestic shalt thou rise,
More dreadful, from each foreign stroke;
As the loud blast that tears the skies,
Serves but to root thy native oak.
- “Rule, Britannia!” (James Thomson and Thomas Arne, 1740)[89]
From: “The Kingdom Strikes Back: Great Britain’s Return to the Jacobin Wars” by Andrew Johnson (1970)—
At the end of 1807, the armies of Great Britain had banished the Frenchman from her sceptered isle. Now, the country collectively stood at something of a loss. The idea of invasion had long been viewed an impossibility, but when it had been raised, the general assumption was that Britain must inevitably fall. A Continental army, far larger and generally more experienced than her own, seemed invincible once it had touched British soil. The onus of defence had therefore been placed entirely upon the Royal Navy, which in the hour of need – thanks more to Fox’s blindness and Lisieux’s Burgundian trickery than any fault of her own save complacency – had been found wanting. Yet that failure had not meant that all was for naught. Against expectations, the nation had not been entirely trampled beneath the foreign boot. The French and their Italian allies had run out of steam, in the figurative if not literal sense; rather, they found for the first time a surfeit of the physical variety, given that their foe had also mated engine to cannon and carriage.
Heroism, courage and pure blind luck had saved the country. What to do next? A time like this called for a decisive leader, and the Duke of Marlborough, John Spencer-Churchill, was all too ready to step into place. All had whispered of it in the privacy of their own homes – or, more likely, the spare bedroom of their Northumbrian second cousins’ homes, given how the chattering classes’ own homes were now mostly laid waste in the ruins of the Home Counties. All knew what must come. But only Churchill would come out and say it. Britain could not sit catching her breath. She must strike back, and hard, at a time when the fate of all Europe, perhaps the world, hung in the balance.
The chief question was precisely how this would be accomplished. Richard Burke and what was left of Parliament were mostly in favour of an invasion of Normandy, one of the regions gradually being stripped of garrison troops by Lisieux’s overambitious triple assault on Flanders, Britain and Royal France. Others, notably the Chancellor Charles Bone, argued for a renewal of the alliance with Royal France and sending troops to the front line there. Many, however, were opposed to this idea, considering the bridges that had been burned. Some were still suspicious of what had, after all, been Britain’s mortal enemy for decades before the Revolution, the Bourbon regime. By force of will, it was Churchill who successfully pushed through his initial preference: sending troops to the Netherlands, together with those the Alliance of Hildesheim and the Mittelbund had already deployed, to face Boulanger.
The strategy made sense on several levels: the bulk of the Alliance consisted of Hanoverian troops and Hanover was dynastically tied to Britain; Flanders was the front upon which the most French troops were deployed and thus could be said to be the pivot upon which the war would turn; and Churchill was himself something of a Germanophile. However, he failed to take Boulanger’s generalship into account. By late January 1808, the Channel was once again dominated by British and Royal French ships; the Royal Navy, partly because of this cobelligerency, were another faction in favour of a renewed alliance, but by this point their position was so discredited as to only harm the credibility of this idea. With the Channel secured, a force of 20,000 men under General Sir Thomas Græme – a veteran of the last phase of the war – were sent to the front. In a quixotic twist typical of Churchill, rather than more logically being sent to Amsterdam so they could then be redeployed to the front line by the Dutch, they were landed behind enemy lines, at Ostende, with the intention of hitting the French in the rear.
However, Boulanger quickly reacted and split off a reserve corps under his deputy General Armand Poulenc to dispatch the British expeditionary force. Poulenc was slightly outnumbered; what happened next is of course subject to many differing interpretations coloured by national pride, but a common analysis is that the usual British discipline broke down in the face of finally facing the enemy who had tried to conquer the motherland, finally on their own turf (or at least F
landers, which seemed close enough). Furthermore Poulenc’s troops were some of the best the Republic had to offer. Græme’s force had been equipped with a full steam tractor corps to pull their artillery, but the ensuing series of battles illustrated that this technological parity alone was not enough to win victory. Poulenc fought brilliantly and, after a crushing defeat at Dixmuyden, Græme was forced to retreat. The British army escaped capture thanks to a daring withdrawal by sea from the port of Dunkerque, but its pride had taken a heavy blow. Græme was briefly court-martialled in the manner of Admiral Keppel fifty years before, but this was swiftly dropped in the realisation that battered Britain needed all the generals she could get – and that Græme had counselled against the Ostende strategy from the start.