Thoroughly alarmed, Pitt, whose government had now been reinforced by the Whig faction represented by the Duke of Portland, sent two emissaries to Vienna to seek stronger Austrian support – Thomas Grenville, brother of the foreign secretary and one of the men who had brokered the end of the American War of Independence, and Lord Spencer. They were to be completely disappointed, finding in Vienna only ‘weakness and inefficiency’ and ‘total want of vigour’.
The Austrians soon surrendered two more fortresses, Valenciennes and Condé, while demanding a subsidy of £3 million from the British for continuing the war in 1794 and a similar figure for the following year. Pitt meanwhile cut off his subsidy to the even more reluctant Prussia, which retaliated by seeking a peace treaty with France.
Faced by collapse in the Low Countries, Pitt cast desperately about, and thought he had found an ally to champion in Joseph, Comte de Puisaye, leader of the Breton resistance, who implored him for 10,000 British troops in support. But both Dundas and Moira were firmly opposed to such an ‘adventure’. Pitt sought to reinforce the French émigré army along the Rhine under the Prince de Condé. In addition, with the bloody fall of Robespierre, he sought solace in the hope of a royalist coup and peace talks to be spearheaded by a wily British envoy and effective leader of the British secret service in France, William Wickham.
Meanwhile the French invaded Holland, taking Sluys and Eindhoven and reaching Cologne. They paused only when they reached the river Waal. Pitt’s talk of ‘embarrassment’ was now replaced by fears of a ‘calamity’. The ineffectual Duke of York was recalled, along with seven regiments, leaving the British troops under the command of General Harcourt. The Dutch began to consider surrender. The British were ‘hated and more dreaded than the enemy, even by the well-disposed inhabitants’.
As ice formed on the rivers, the French pressed forward across the Waal, until checked by a British and German counter-attack. At the village of Boxtel, the twenty-five-year-old Arthur Wellesley ordered his men to open their lines to allow the fleeing soldiery through, then closed his line as the French galloped forward in pursuit. He waited until they were almost upon him before giving the order to fire and, as the foremost assailants fell, the rest turned round and fled.
The situation was desperate. Supplies of transport, medical equipment – such as it was – and clothing had all broken down, although food was still plentiful. General Craig reported that the army was ‘despised by our enemies, without discipline, confidence or exertions among ourselves . . . every disgrace and misfortune is to be expected’.
William Wilberforce proposed talks with France. Pitt angrily rejected this in December. Holland, however, fell to the French the following month and the principal British ally, the Stadtholder, fled to England. Amsterdam was taken on 19 January 1795, and a few days later the French cavalry galloped across the Zuyder Zee to seize the Dutch fleet, imprisoned in the ice. The British continued to retreat in a desperate shambles while the Dutch sued for peace and the French in February impounded British ships in Dutch ports.
The same month Pitt decided to withdraw the remains of the army from the continent: by April the infantry and part of the artillery were embarked at Bremen, leaving only the cavalry, some of the gunners, the Hanoverians, and what remained of the Austrians attached to the British forces. An eyewitness described the wretched British evacuation: ‘There were few who had not lost a limb; many had lost both legs and arms; numbers of them were reduced to mere skeletons.’
It had been one of the worst defeats in British military history, with casualties even higher than the previous year, around 20,000 or two thirds of the entire British expeditionary army. The French imposed strict terms on the Dutch, including taking Maastricht, part of southern Holland, and the area around Flushing. The Dutch navy and part of its army were conscripted to the war against Britain. By the end of the terrible year of 1794 it seemed game, set and match to the French: they had won twenty-seven pitched battles, killed 80,000 and taken as many prisoners. They had conquered Flanders, made Holland a puppet, crossed the Rhine, subdued the Vendée and retaken Toulon. The return of these wretched men across the Channel in defeat was a truly black day for British arms.
The Prussians now signed a peace treaty with France at Basle, and by the middle of 1795 the conclusion was inescapable that Britain’s prosecution of the continental war against revolutionary France had been an utter disaster. The French had twice repulsed large combined allied armies attacking from the north, the second time crushing Holland and forcing the British to evacuate under pitiable and ignominious circumstances. France had stood alone against most of Europe, and magnificently repulsed its enemies.
After the glories of the previous century, Britain’s reputation as a military power on land had descended to an all-time low: the shambles in Toulon and in Holland now eclipsed memories of the triumphs of Clive in India and Wolfe in Quebec. The British policy of trying to get its continental allies to do most of the fighting through bribery was neither very glorious nor very successful. The Hessians and the Hanoverians had proved indifferent troops; the Prussians had haggled and then deserted when the British had been unwilling to be browbeaten; and huge offers of subsidy had not yet persuaded the Austrians to take the offensive. With the Low Countries effectively in enemy hands, and Spain now lost, the only friendly country now left to Britain west of Corsica, Sardinia and parts of Italy was little Portugal.
Chapter 19
THE SPICE ISLANDS
The British land war in Europe, in conjunction with its allies, Austria, Prussia and Holland, had quickly collapsed into a shambles. At sea the overconfident French now proposed to go on the offensive against Britain, in an attempt to isolate Britain from lines of commerce and disrupt its trade routes. This had long been an objective of French government policy under the monarchy and was adopted by the revolutionaries, who were as much nationalists as radicals.
French policy towards Britain was dictated by centuries of age-old enmity, and in the half century before the Revolution, while great battles had been fought on land (in India, at Quebec, and at Yorktown, which was essentially a French rather than an American victory) the main centre of operations had been at sea. France had watched in growing anxiety and envy as the tentacles of the British empire had spread across the world. As their great rival embarked on an industrial revolution that was financed by imperial revenues, Britain moved out in front as the world’s superpower. France was determined to challenge this, and above all, to do so by cutting Britain off from her economic lifelines, as she was seen to be supremely vulnerable because of her island status.
As early as January 1793, Kersaint, the Revolution’s foreign affairs spokesman, had declared to the Convention: ‘The credit of England rests upon fictitious wealth; the real riches of that people are scattered everywhere . . . Bounded in territory, the public future of England is found almost wholly in its Bank, and this edifice is entirely supported by the wonderful activity of their naval commerce. Asia, Portugal, and Spain are the most advantageous markets for the productions of English industry; we should shut these markets to the English by opening them to the world.’
In October 1796, the French Republic declared that all ships of any nationality carrying British goods were subject to seizure and that only ships carrying a ‘certificate of origin’ to prove that the goods were not from Britain would be exempt. But the French had made a classic mistake: with the advent of an industrial and agricultural revolution in Britain, both domestic corn and textile output was increasing dramatically. Thus Britain was moving towards self-sufficiency in key areas of production. The industrial revolution permitted Britain to produce cotton, woollen and muslin goods, as well as hardwares of high value and small bulk which were ideal for smuggling past the French blockade into Europe. Steam was applied to spinning in Britain in the 1790s, taking advantage of copious supplies of coal; in France it was not used until 1812. The cost of weaving a piece of cloth in Britain while the war with France p
rogressed fell dramatically from nearly 40 shillings in 1795 to just 15 shillings in 1810. The French underestimated this, and believed that all they had to do was cut off trade to bring the British economy juddering to a halt. In the event, however, they found Britain only too happy to fight back.
The principal theatres of naval and colonial conflict were to be the West Indies, source of the lucrative sugar trade; the East Indies, with their spices, merchandise and bullion; and the Mediterranean, not just a trading lake in its own right, but a key to communication with the East. This global war was also played out against the Cape of Good Hope, a key staging post for trade with the East Indies; and parts of Latin America, viewed by Britain and France as a potential source of great wealth as the Spanish empire crumbled. Eventually too, for somewhat different reasons, the young United States was to be dragged into the conflict.
The West Indies’ sugar trade was enormously lucrative; but the islands, with their dense foliage and high rainfall were soporifically hot, breeding grounds for disease, and increasingly prone to slave rebellions against the hugely wealthy owners of the giant and inhuman plantations. Pitt saw the war as an opportunity to take on France in the colonies, always Britain’s chief interest. The British had some 6,000 troops stationed in the Caribbean; and French planters on the isles of St Domingue, Martinique and Guadeloupe, deeply hostile to the revolutionary regime in France, had already appealed to the British to take their islands over.
There followed a pyrrhic campaign of an ineptitude which mirrored Pitt’s disastrous conduct of the continental war against France. In February 1793 attacks were authorized on the French Windward Islands and on Tobago. In April the latter was taken in a small-scale attack, but the French garrison in Martinique drove off the British assailants in June. At the time it was learnt that the French were sending reinforcements to the West Indies but, thanks to cabinet indecision, it was not until November that a British squadron, under Sir John Jervis and Sir Charles Grey, got under way, largely because the former sensibly would wait no longer.
Meanwhile the British forces based in Jamaica had landed on Dominique, where the local planters had appealed to the British for help against a slave uprising. Mole St Nicholas promptly surrendered to the British, who now decided to block the capital, Port-au-Prince. But the British force – some 900 men at its largest – was small. Only in May 1794 was their precarious toehold on the island reinforced with the arrival of Jervis’s squadron.
Jervis and Grey had already performed superbly, raiding Barbados in January with 7,000 troops, seizing Martinique in March, St Lucia in April, the Saints and Guadeloupe by the end of the month. Port-au-Prince fell in June. It was a clean sweep: it seemed that the Caribbean had become a British lake. Pitt, who by now was facing increasingly bad news in Europe, was exultant.
The West Indies were of huge commercial importance, particularly to the French, accounting for fully a third of that country’s trade, mainly in sugar, cotton and coffee. Almost a fifth of the French population depended on the West Indies for their livelihoods, particularly the towns of Nantes, Bordeaux, Le Havre and Marseilles and it was no coincidence that these were some of the least enthusiastic supporters of the Revolution which imperilled that trade through war with Britain.
Then, in June, the French squadron that had escaped the British Naval blockade of Rochefort in April arrived. This landed 1,500 troops on Guadeloupe, which after fierce fighting the British had to give up, while retaining the eastern half of the island; they evacuated altogether in December. Fighting also broke out in western St Domingue. Meanwhile ferocious black uprisings occurred there and the Windward Isles, while the British forces were ravaged by tropical diseases.
The British tried to assemble a relief expedition from England and Ireland, but many of the troops were required elsewhere. By the end of the year only three regiments and a single ship from Plymouth had arrived. By then another French contingent of 1,500 French troops had reached Guadeloupe, having dodged the British blockade outside Brest. The British debated earnestly whether to counter this by raising troops from the black and mulatto populations, Pitt eventually deciding not to do so, for fear of offending local white interests.
In March, however, the black populations rose up against the British in a concerted revolt in Grenada, St Vincent and St Lucia, forcing the soldiers to retreat into their garrisons. Toussaint L’Ouverture, the legendary black leader of St Domingue, also continued to fight, and there was even an uprising in Jamaica. Reinforcements at last arrived and helped the British regain some control of Grenada and St Vincent. But thousands were lost to disease and fighting – some 2,000 in St Domingue alone.
In June 1795, a further 2,000 men were sent to the Caribbean. The following month the British took a much more serious step: a senior British commander, Sir Ralph Abercromby, was placed in charge of an army of 15,000 men with a naval squadron to retake Guadeloupe and St Lucia, to seize the Dutch settlements of Surinam, Demerara and San Eustatius (the Dutch in Europe having now made their peace with the victorious French) and completely to subdue not just Grenada and St Vincent but St Domingue and San Domingo.
The expedition was seriously delayed, and squabbles broke out as to its objectives. It was soon scaled down. Abercromby, who arrived in April 1796, retook St Lucia and then occupied St Vincent and Grenada in June. Demerara was also taken. San Domingue was reinforced, but not subdued, while Guadeloupe was left alone. These successes were modest but they were virtually all the British government had to show as reverse followed reverse across continental Europe.
Abercromby was ordered to take Trinidad, and even Puerto Rico. For Pitt the West Indies were now the main theatre of military operations. His judgement has seriously to be questioned, perhaps even more so than over the disastrously half-hearted and ineffectual effort on the continent: for the fighting did little serious damage to French trade and did little to increase the volume of British trade. The two most important objectives of St Domingue and Guadeloupe had not been secured, with only a toehold on the one and expulsion from the other: and ultimately this costly war was to take the lives of a staggering 50,000 British soldiers and seamen, mostly through disease – nearly 40 per cent of those sent over to fight. In Pitt’s defence, had he not acted, the French might have gone on the offensive against the British. But he had delivered the first blow and prioritized the campaign. He had appallingly little to show for it.
The view from London by mid-1795 was one of almost unrelieved gloom: the British had been thrown off the continent; the Dutch were now occupied and hostile; the Prussians and the Spanish had dropped out of the war, and the latter were turning hostile. Tuscany and Sardinia were already so. The Danes were potential enemies. The Russians, while now sympathetic to Britain, were too remote to offer much assistance. Britain was achieving modest successes in the West Indies, at a considerable cost of men lost through illness, for dubious long-term gains. Moreover, for more than a year there had been no spectacular fleet action, apart from several superb frigate encounters which, however, had no decisive effect on the war.
Pitt and Grenville pinned their hopes on two will-o’-the-wisps: that revolutionary France might yet collapse, of which there was little sign – they had missed their opportunity when it really was disintegrating – and that the Austrians could be tempted again to stage a major offensive against France, which seemed an unlikely course of action for the weak, serious-minded young Emperor.
An emissary was despatched to Vienna: Francis Jackson, a diplomat, left in mid-October and arrived to find the Austrian court highly optimistic. They had launched a counter-attack and defeated the French at Mainz, then moved into the Palatinate, raising the sieges of Mannheim and Frankfurt. The Austrian chief minister, Baron Johann Thugut, was warmly welcoming, promising 200,000 men in exchange for the suggested £3 million loan, although seeking better rates of interest.
However, the rally proved to be cruelly shortlived: a combined Austro-Sardinian force was defeated at Loano, which
made them pull out of the coastline west of Genoa. The Austrian commander on the Rhine, Field Marshal Francis Clairfait, sought an armistice to give rest to his exhausted men. Pitt offered peace feelers to what was seen to be a new and more moderate government in France, that of the Directory, which had just taken control. The response was a blunt rebuff. The French returned a flat no until all British conquests were returned and France was recognized as having natural frontiers extending to the Rhine, the Alps and Pyrenees. Pitt had failed to realize that the Directory, just as much as the Jacobins, required perpetual war to maintain its control, mobilizing French patriotism to distract the people from the shambles and privations at home.
Part 3
CONQUEROR OF ITALY
Chapter 20
THE OUTSIDER
The dismal year of 1795 was also marked by an event that went almost unnoticed in Britain. Napoleon Bonaparte, when ordered to command the artillery in the Vendée, which he regarded as tantamount to exile, under his more successful young rival Lazare Hoche, simply turned the post down. Given the importance of the revolt in the Vendée and the possibility he would make his name there, it was an extraordinary thing for him to do, and aroused suspicions that he was not really devoted to the revolutionary cause. It seems likely that he was still hoping to be sent to Italy as a theatre of operations.
Napoleon was put on leave and spent a few miserable months in Paris, where he found himself impoverished and something of a social outcast, most of his half-pay going on supporting his dispossessed family in Toulon: Napoleon was never more attractive than in his dogged support of his family in difficult times. A female contemporary remarked of him in Paris: ‘I can still picture him, entering the courtyard of the Hôtel de la Tranquillité, and crossing it with an awkward, uncertain step. He wore a nasty round hat pulled down over his eyes, from which his hair, like a spaniel’s ears, flopped over his frock-coat . . . an overall sickly effect was created by his thinness and his yellow complexion.’
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