The War of Wars

by Robert Harvey

  Along the coast, Deal, Walmer and Dover had strong fortifications and guns, but Dungeness was exposed, so defences were hurriedly constructed. A network of Martello towers – edifices with guns on top and thirteen-foot-thick walls – were built in Sussex, Kent, Suffolk and Essex. A huge military camp was built at Weedon in Northampton-shire on the Grand Union Canal which included a small palace for the King and houses for the government in the event of London being captured. A popular ditty called ‘The Bellman and little Boney’ reflected the confused feelings of the time:

  This little Boney says he’ll come

  At merry Christmas time,

  But that I say is all a hum

  Or I no more will rhyme.

  Some say in wooden house he’ll glide

  Some say in air balloon,

  E’en those who airy schemes deride

  Agree his coming soon.

  Now honest people list to me,

  Though income is but small,

  I’ll bet my wig to one Pen-ney

  He does not come at all.

  A system of beacons covered the coastline: there were frequent alarms when the beacons were set ablaze by sparks. Grenville and other opponents of the government grew increasingly derisory about the government’s defensive tactics. When blockhouses were proposed to defend the Thames, Canning wrote caustically:

  If blocks can a nation deliver,

  Two places are safe from the French:

  The one is the mouth of the river,

  The other the Treasury Bench!

  Pitt on coming to office had proposed at once to go on the offensive. As he made his preparations and another glorious summer descended, the prospect of invasion seemed unreal.

  Pitt embarked on a two-pronged offensive: the government courted allies, most notably the Russians; and decided to stage an attack on the French coastal defences. He even toyed with the ideas of a remarkable American inventor, Robert Fulton, who had imaginatively tried to pioneer steam-driven paddleships for Napoleon, as well as a crude submarine and torpedoes, Nautilus, with a 21-foot long hull and hand-driven propeller worked by its crew of three, which could descend some 25 feet below the surface and stay submerged for three-quarters of an hour.

  Fulton’s ideas were referred to a secret committee, which described the submarine as impractical, but further investigated torpedoes, which were dubbed ‘hogsheads’ or ‘carcasses’. These were primitive in the extreme:

  made of copper and . . . spherical in form; hollow to receive their charge of powder, which, by means of machinery that worked interiorly, and so secured to be perfectly watertight, exploded at the precise moment that you chose to set it to. The mode of managing them was in this wise: two, attached together by means of a line coiled carefully clear, were placed in the boat ready to be roped overboard. The line was buoyed by corks, like the topping of a sein [net], so as to allow the carcasses to sink to a certain depth and no further.

  When you had approached near enough to the vessel against which you meant to direct the carcass and saw clearly that you were in a position that the line could not fail to strike her cable, one carcass was dropped overboard and, when that had extended the full length of the line from the boat, then the other, both having been carefully primed and set to the time, which would allow of their floating to their destined object before they exploded. Of course, it is presumed that wind and tide set in the direction, so as to ensure their not deviating from their course . . .

  That was the biggest catch of all – and in this they more resembled mines than submarines. The project was quietly shelved.

  Spurred by Pitt, Lord Keith had decided to stage a morale-boosting attack on Boulogne at the end of the summer of 1804. In October a serious assault was staged with four ‘explosion vessels’ packed with gunpowder as well as Fulton’s torpedoes. The attack resulted only in the destruction of a French pinnace with around thirty men. Still the British tried: there were two more attacks in November. Other plans included a joint torpedo-rocket attack – the latter were supposed to divert French attentions from the approaching torpedoes – and a catamaran joined by a platform with a ramp which could be used for landing a field gun and fifty soldiers to stage commando raids. The truth was that ‘the coast of iron and bronze’ built by Napoleon, comprising batteries and stone defences, while not impregnable, was very strong. ‘One field gun to every league of coast is the least allowance’, Napoleon had ordered, and the British could make little impression. Their raids at least demonstrated that the government was no longer passively defensive, as Addington’s had been.

  Still, though, Napoleon made no move. This was largely because of the delays involved in constructing his invasion fleet and bringing it to anchorage. Napoleon also began to understand that his huge force – which he fondly imagined could cross on a cloudy night under cover of fog (but what about collisions?) would need a covering fleet. ‘Eight hours of night in favourable weather will decide the fate of the universe,’ he declared. But the practicalities were that the armada might be overwhelmed by an unexpected squall, or suddenly becalmed, and would anyway take at least three tides to float. He had to postpone the attempt. But he did not give up, claiming that ’nearly 120,000 men and 3,000 boats . . . only await a favourable wind to plant the imperial eagle on the Tower of London’.

  With characteristic ruthlessness he declared that it did not matter if 20,000 men were drowned on the way. ‘One loses that in battle every day.’ On 20 June he insisted on holding a naval review in appalling weather. Several ships were wrecked and 20,000 men lost. But the greater danger was losing his entire invasion force.

  At last, by January 1805 he had accepted that the crossing was impossible without the French fleet either protecting the huge flotilla or diverting the British fleet. Armed with this brilliant new intuition, there followed three extraordinary attempts to use France’s fleets in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean to achieve just this, in elaborate and intricate battle plans that sought to imitate at sea the precise movements of bodies of men Napoleon so successfully commanded on land. It seemed that Napoleon had at last discovered the formula for success.

  In the summer of 1805, with the British guard at home now lowered, although more men had received training in arms than ever before, it seemed likely that at last the years of French preparation would pay off and a huge landing would be staged on the English coast, which would probably force the British back at least to their second lines of defence around London and possibly even result in the loss of the capital. It was the most desperate moment of the war for Britain. Pitt, now seriously ill, presided over a faltering government. At last the reckoning had arrived. Britain was at the mercy of the largest invasion force ever used against her; and with Britain subdued, Napoleon and France would be the unchallenged masters of ‘Europe from the Atlantic to the Rhine, from the Netherlands to Naples, the greatest empire in the continent’s history since Roman times, Charlemagne included’.

  As his own private secretary, Méneval, remarked: ‘Napoleon expected the overthrow of England to be a mere three months’ business. The first victory would have opened the road to London. Communications established in Ireland and Scotland, and a general uprising against the privileged classes of the English lords would have done the rest.’ Later Napoleon was famously to declare that: ‘England is naturally meant to be an appendage to France. Nature made her just as much one of her islands as Corsica and Oleron.’ No doubt he had the Norman invasion of 1066 in mind as well.

  Part of the reason why Napoleon’s seriousness is doubted in 1804 was because of the experience in 1795, when he was the general in charge of the earlier threatened invasion of England and immediately decided the feat was impossible, remaining on the French Channel coast only to divert attention from the planned invasion of Egypt. During the summer of 1804, a war with Austria in the east was not an immediate prospect and one he believed he could avoid.

  If the preparations for invading England were indeed a feint, they were
to be among the most expensive in the history of warfare. The establishment of huge army camps, the building of artificial harbours, the colossal costs of constructing landing craft – all of these would have been deliberately wasted if the projected invasion was all along intended to be a bluff. The idea, in retrospect, seems absurd. It seems all the more so in view of the deadly seriousness of Napoleon’s naval preparations, based on his understanding that massed ship protection was necessary for an invasion to be successfully mounted. These were to involve the bulk of his fleet, consisting of some seventy ships, which he summoned back from the West Indies.

  In London Earl St Vincent, the First Lord, who had so rashly launched an attack on corruption in naval dockyards during the short year of peace, so that half his ships were left unrepaired, had come to exactly the same conclusion. With the declaration of war his policy was to blockade the French ports closely so that their warships would never obtain even momentary control of the Channel and be able to escort the invasion fleet across. As Nelson put it, ‘Our first line of defence is close to the enemy ports.’

  ‘Let us,’ declared Napoleon, ‘be master of the Straits [of Dover] for six hours and we shall be masters of the world.’ As usual, this was hyperbole: if the British regained control of the Straits and cut off the cross-Channel supply line to an invading French army, it would have been in desperate trouble. However, it contained a grain of truth. The British fleet was divided in three – Cornwallis and Collingwood blockading Brest, L’Orient and Rochefort, Keith blockading the Texel and Nelson in the Mediterranean watching Toulon. The returning fleet from the West Indies took shelter in Spanish ports, where they were blockaded, first by Sir Alexander Cochrane and later by Sir Edward Pellew. British frigates acted as watchdogs keeping an eye on the French fleets’ movements.

  Blockade duty was grim and thankless as ships sought to maintain their stations. Gales and shifting tides threatened to batter them on to shoals if they came too close to the shore, while if they stood too far off the enemy might give them the slip in bad weather. The log book of the Impetueux in the gale of December 1803 gives some idea of the conditions.

  At four strong gales, with heavy squalls. At half-past six strong gales, with heavy squalls; carried away the starboard main brace and larboard main topsail sheet; sail blew to pieces; mizzen and fore staysail blew to pieces, and mainsail blew from the yard. At eight obliged to scuttle the lower deck; ship labouring very much, and gained six inches on the pumps. At quarter-past eight the carpenter reported the mizzen mast was sprung, in consequence of the vangs of the gaff giving way. At half-past eight was struck with a sea on the larboard quarter, stove in eleven of the main-deck ports, half-filled the maindeck, and carried away the chain-plate of the foremost main shroud. Bore up under a reefed foresail. Saw a line-of-battle ship lying to, with her head to the southward, and her sails split and blowing from the yards.

  In the Mediterranean, weather conditions were a little easier, although violent gales could blow up suddenly, and Nelson was hundreds of miles away from friends, his only bases being Malta and Gibraltar. Nelson’s tactic was not to blockade too closely, but to seek to lure the French out and do battle: he kept just a watching frigate offshore and his main ships out to sea. These were scattered all the way from the Balearic Islands off Spain, to Sardinia and Corsica, each ship patrolling sections of the sea with a frigate accompanying Nelson’s flagship, the Victory, to herd all the ships together if the French fleet broke out: ‘Every opportunity,’ said Nelson, must be offered to the enemy to put to sea, for it is there we hope to realize the hopes and expectations of our country.’

  Latouche-Tréville, in command of twelve line-of-battle ships, accused Nelson of ‘running before him’, much to the latter’s amusement. From May 1803 to August 1805 Nelson left his ship just three times, for less than an hour on each occasion; small wonder the admiral’s gait was far more accustomed to the rolling of his ship than to the firmness of dry land. The blockades vastly tested and improved British seamanship, as well as lowering the quality of French sailing, for their ships were kept bottled up in port for months at a time. When the French fleet tried to slip away from Toulon in a gale, they were immediately driven back into port. Nelson commented wryly: ‘These gentlemen are not accustomed to a Gulf of Lyon gale, which we have buffeted for twenty-one months and not carried away a spar.’

  While Britain anxiously anticipated an invasion, Napoleon had changed his mind several times as to how to stage this. During the autumn he had declared confidently that all he wanted was a calm Channel and winter fog – until it was pointed out to him that his force might get lost in a fog. Calm waters were anyway unlikely to last for long during the winter. The sheer size of the invading fleet would require as many as three tides to carry it from French ports, which raised the prospect of part of the force wallowing at the mercy of the British ships and the weather as it waited for the rest to come out. Reluctantly Napoleon abandoned his idea of staging an invasion in winter.

  He conceived a new plan: luring the British fleet to go in chase of one of his fleets, so that another fleet might accompany the invasion force in the spring or summer. He also had 20,000 troops on hand in Brest ready to invade Ireland. Cornwallis was forced to stay off Brest or further out in the Atlantic, anticipating an attack on Ireland. Meanwhile Latouche-Tréville’s ships in Toulon would escape Nelson’s blockade, move eastwards to lure Nelson in pursuit, then veer west and escape through the Straits of Gibraltar, defeating the British squadron blockading Brest and, reinforced from that port, acting as an escort for the attacking armada.

  Like so many of Napoleon’s naval plans, it had all the mathematical precision of a land manoeuvre, but failed to allow for the unpredictability of naval warfare – the surprise movement of enemy fleets, the difficulty in locating them, the changes in the weather and tides that could throw the best laid ideas into disarray. This plan was drafted in January 1804, but it was soon overtaken by unpredictable events.

  But the very capable French Admiral Latouche-Tréville suddenly fell dead from a heart attack, as he walked up to the observation point at Toulon, as he did nearly every day, to look out for the British fleet. Admiral Villeneuve, of whom Napoleon rightly had a far lower opinion, took his place. A new variant of the strategy evolved: the Brest Squadron under Admiral Ganteaume was to emerge, sail far out into the Atlantic and then sweep back to land 18,000 men in Northern Ireland, which was believed to be ripe for insurrection.

  Meanwhile the Toulon and Rochefort fleets were also to break out, liaise in the West Indies and attack the British there. Napoleon believed that the British would despatch thirty ships of the line to defend their West Indian possessions in pursuit of the twenty French ships. Meanwhile Admiral Ganteaume’s fleet was to curve back around northern Scotland to convoy the invasion landing craft to England, while the British fleet was still messing about in the West Indies.

  This fantastic scheme was ingenious and over-complex. It required far too many variables to go according to plan. Napoleon hesitated and, as the summer passed, he assembled no more than three-quarters of the 130,000 troops he needed, along with 1,100 invasion barges. He decided the opportunity had passed that year, and resolved to try again the following summer. Pitt emerged from retirement to the House of Commons, where he gave a stirring call to arms:

  We are come to a new era in the history of nations; we are called to struggle for the destiny, not of this country alone but of the civilized world. We must remember that it is not only for ourselves that we submit to unexampled privations. We have for ourselves the great duty of self-preservation to perform; but the duty of the people of England now is of a nobler and higher order . . . Amid the wreck and the misery of nations it is our just exultation that we have continued superior to all that ambition or that despotism could effect; and our still higher exultation ought to be that we provide not only for our own safety but hold out a prospect for nations now bending under the iron yoke of tyranny of what the exertions of
a free people can effect.

  The hapless Addington resigned the following day. The King sent for Pitt and it seemed at last that a coalition government, a ministry of all the talents, was to be formed under Britain’s most resolute political leader. A ‘large comprehensive administration’ was drawn up which would include Fox and Fitzwilliam, as well as Grenville as Lord President of the Council and Grey as secretary of war. But inexplicably Pitt, although he held a strong hand and should have been able to dictate to the erratic old King, hinted that he would not insist on Fox and Grenville, whom the monarch detested, joining the government. He suggested that the King should ‘understand distinctly that if after considering the subject, he resolved to exclude the friends both of Mr Fox and Lord Grenville, but wished to call upon me to form a government without them, I should be ready to do so, as well as I could, from among my own immediate friends, united with the most capable and unexceptionable persons of the present Government; but of course excluding many of them, and above all, Addington himself, and Lord St Vincent.’

  Thus Pitt, no longer himself the bold figure of old and visibly ailing, gave the sometimes mad King latitude to dictate the shape of his ministry: and he biliously refused to admit Fox, saying he would prefer civil war. Grenville, now in honour bound to his fellow Whig, Fox, refused to join in sympathy. Pitt was bitter towards his cousin: ‘I will teach that proud man that in the service and with the confidence of the King I can do without him, though I think my health such that it may cost me my life.’ He was deprived not only of Britain’s greatest orator but of his invaluable foreign secretary and closest counsel in government at the time when Britain most needed both.

  The new cabinet was so weak, apart from Canning and Castlereagh, that it was dubbed ‘the administration of William and Pitt’. Pitt resumed the office of prime minister on the same day, 18 May 1804, that Napoleon was proclaimed Emperor. The scene was thus set for a duel to the death between the staunchest opponent of revolutionary France and the new dictator that had throttled the Revolution and channelled its energies into French overseas expansion.