The Banner of Battle

by Alan Palmer

  ‘If you have not entire confidence in the strength of the combined forces of France and England, you had better say so to me at once, and decline to accept command!’ the First Lord told Napier; but the exclamation mark indicates the response he anticipated.[153] The appointment to the Baltic command was made public on 15 February 1854. There followed a fortnight of extraordinary adulation. As a geographical concept, the Baltic was better known to the British people than the Black Sea: ships had sailed regularly in the summer months from British ports to Riga and St Petersburg for more than 120 years, and Tsar Peter’s island citadel of Kronstadt had first aroused concern at the Admiralty half a century before Catherine the Great approved plans for the building of Sebastopol. When Admiral Napier was reported as saying, ‘Within a month of entering the Baltic I shall be in Kronstadt, or in Heaven’, people knew what he meant. His mood was echoed in a warning jingle addressed to the Tsar and published on the first weekend in March:

  Ere you feel the summer breezes,

  You may thank your lucky stars

  If you do not yield to Napier,

  And his gallant Jack Tars.[154]

  The Admiral was feasted at a Reform Club banquet in Pall Mall on Tuesday, 7 March, with the Home Secretary in the chair. ‘I never saw a man in my life who calculated so many moves before hand as Sir Charles Napier,’ Palmerston declared as he toasted the guest of honour. In reply, Napier pointed out that ‘we are still in a state of peace’, but he hoped that when he reached the Baltic ‘I shall have an opportunity of declaring war’. Sir James Graham thereupon assured ‘the gallant Admiral on my left’ that ‘I, as the First Lord of the Admiralty, give him my full consent to do so.’[155]

  These speeches excited comment. On the following Monday Fitzstephen French, the Radical member for Roscommon, challenged the First Lord’s remarks in the Commons. Graham’s response, doubting if any MP might ‘put down a question with respect to what passed after dinner at the Reform Club,’ angered John Bright. Such ‘reckless levity’, he complained, was ‘discreditable to the grave and responsible statesmen of a civilised and Christian nation’. There were angry exchanges: Palmerston mocked both Bright and Cobden; and Disraeli sought to laugh off the whole affair. But it was Bright who won the day. ‘I heard Bright say everything I thought,’ his old political adversary Macaulay noted; and, in Dublin, Father John Henry Newman pasted a copy of the Quaker dissenter’s speech into a scrapbook. There was still a public conscience, after all.[156]

  By the time of these Commons exchanges, Napier was already at sea. The first of the ‘terrible squadrons’ which, the reading public was told, would ‘swamp the Baltic’ left the Solent on Saturday, 11 March. That morning Victoria Pier, Portsmouth, was ‘literally black with struggling people’ eager to catch a glimpse of the Admiral as he embarked; ‘the water was thronged with craft of all kinds’ and, at Southsea, ‘as far as the eye could reach, the shores were covered with spectators’. From the royal yacht Fairy the Queen and Prince Albert saw ‘our noble fleet’, manned by 9,390 seamen and marines, ‘passing us close by and giving us three hearty cheers’. A privileged reporter, dropping astern of the flagship as she sailed into open seas, ‘saw the Admiral pacing the stern-galley outside his cabin’.[157]

  If Napier was deep in thought that afternoon, it is hardly surprising. Great things were expected of him. ‘We have a deuce of a job in hand...with a raw squadron to attack an efficient fleet in their own waters,’ he told Captain Paget of the Princess Royal a few days earlier in a moment of realism. But, as Paget later recalled, ‘by the time he had finished half a dozen cigars, he had informed me of such bloodthirsty resolves that...I slept little that night’.[158] A more experienced officer sensed the emptiness behind Napier’s bombast. On the Sunday before the Reform Club banquet, Napier called on the last surviving commander who had served with the Royal Navy in the Baltic during the Napoleonic Wars. The octogenarian Admiral Sir Byam Martin was astonished to find Napier ignorant of what were to him elementary navigational hazards in the inland northern seas: ‘Try by every means to tempt or persuade the Russian fleet to come out and meet ours in deep water, but even in that case be prepared for great annoyance from the gunboats which are numerous and heavily armed,’ Sir Byam advised Napier. So disturbed was Sir Byam that he prepared ‘a memorandum while the conversation is fresh in my recollection’ and sent it to the Admiralty. Of the Baltic fleet’s chosen commander, he wrote, ‘It was clear to me that he was by no means at ease, but on the contrary very nervous’.[159]

  *

  When war was declared, Napier’s flagship, the Duke of Wellington, was already with the main fleet off Kiel; and on that day the First Lord of the Admiralty felt sufficiently in command of events to give the Foreign Secretary an unsolicited lesson in grand strategy. ‘We have Napier in the right place at the right time,’ Graham wrote to Clarendon. ‘In concert with France we must make every effort to reinforce him; and neither ships nor troops ought to be wanting. If we can drive Sweden into line, we shall press the Czar much nearer home than on the Danube; and more decisive results may be obtained in the Baltic and with greater ease than in the Black Sea. The northern allies are of better stuff than your Mahometans...I am eager in the Baltic cause.’ And again, four days later, in a second letter to Clarendon, Graham declared: ‘My hopes rest on Sweden.’[160]

  Soon Lord John Russell and Palmerston were following Graham’s lead, hoping that the Swedes would supply troops to support Napier. Palmerston favoured a promise to Sweden of the retrocession of Finland, thus weakening the Tsar’s Empire ‘for the future security of Europe’; but Russell wanted no offer of a ‘bribe’ to the Swedes, declaring that ‘they must take the fortune of war’. Aberdeen and Gladstone were unenthusiastic, the Chancellor of the Exchequer preferring a subsidy offered to Austria rather than Sweden. The debate within the cabinet over inducements for Sweden dragged on and on throughout the brief Baltic campaigning season of long summer days and ice-free ports.[161]

  In France, too, there was great interest in the Baltic, with the Emperor as eager for a Swedish alliance as Graham. Napoleon III made much of the dynastic associations linking Paris and Stockholm. The reigning sovereign, Oscar I, was a son of King Charles XIV John (formerly Marshal Bernadotte) and of Queen Desideria (Desirée Clary, General Bonaparte’s ‘first love’), who was still alive. Moreover he was married to Napoleon III’s first cousin, Josephine de Beauharnais. King Oscar even owed his unusual regnal name to the whim of his godfather, the great Napoleon, who had encountered it in his favourite reading, an Italian translation of the legends of Ossian. It is not surprising that, as soon as war was declared, Napoleon III made secret approaches to Oscar to tempt Sweden into the war. But Oscar prided himself on his statecraft: he was on amiable terms with Tsar Nicholas, with whom his wife had ties of kinship; he was reluctant to rekindle dying antagonisms by reviving Swedish rule over the Finns; and he possessed all the old Bernadotte family instinct for good diplomatic timing. In London and Paris Oscar seemed exasperatingly devious: ‘The King of Sweden appears to be rather shy of our Ministers and entirely to distrust his own,’ Lord Aberdeen commented in a note to Clarendon.[162] From the allies Oscar sought a subsidy, an assurance of worthwhile territorial gains, and a guarantee that Austria, too, would enter the war against Russia. And, as a first step towards Sweden’s entry into the war, he looked for some sign that Napier’s 44 ships and 2,200 guns were capable of triumphs more dramatic than the successful enforcement of a blockade. This was not forthcoming.

  The odyssey of the Baltic Fleet in 1854 is no epic of naval history. At the outset, for some three weeks, the campaign promised well. Russia’s warships and merchantmen were closely confined in the Gulfs of Bothnia, Riga and Finland, there was no danger of a Russian sally into the North Sea, and Napier seemed poised ‘to undertake the hostile operations’ left impressively vague in his formal orders from the Admiralty. It was assumed that he would attack one or more of the four key fortresses: the island citadel of Sveab
org, off Helsinki; Bomarsund, in the Aaland Islands, protecting the town now known as Maarianhamina; the much weaker Estonian fortified port of Reval (now Tallinn); and, most important of all, the citadel of Kronstadt, two hundred miles up the Gulf of Finland. It was left to the Admiral’s ‘abilities and judgement’ to select his objective. Along the coast from St Petersburg to Peterhof the Russians daily expected to see the masts of allied warships through the summer haze.[163]

  At the end of April Sir James Graham admitted to Clarendon ‘an apprehension...sometimes felt that Napier may be driven for fear of the Press into some rash act of desperate daring, which may lead to a great disaster’; and he added, ‘I shall endeavour to counteract this dangerous tendency’.[164] He need not have worried. Napier had no intention of risking vessels in waters so shallow that they might run aground within range of fortresses bristling with artillery. Sveaborg and Helsinki, Napier informed Graham in late May, were ‘unattackable by sea or Land; he said nothing of Kronstadt.[165] Meanwhile Russian gunboats heat offassaults on the small forts of Hangö and Abö, the British contenting themselves with raids on fishing settlements on both sides of the Baltic. By midsummer The Times was printing accounts from Sweden of hardships inflicted by Napier’s men on the small communities along the Gulf of Bothnia and around Abö: ‘One shriek of woe sounds all through Finland,’ a correspondent reported. But when, in the Commons, the Manchester radical Milner Gibson protested at the navy’s activities, Graham maintained that Napier’s squadrons had every right to search and destroy enemy vessels and harbours so long as the Russian Baltic fleet declined to come out and give battle at sea.[166]

  It is not surprising if Gibson’s humanitarianism received rough treatment in the Commons, for the House had even failed to respond to John Bright’s noble speech condemning the war at its very outset. The British public accepted the coming of war as a dutiful obligation. When a ‘National Day of Fast and Humiliation’ was proclaimed on Wednesday, 26 April, Bright was affronted by what he considered a spectacle of mass hypocrisy, ‘much like a gang of burglars seeking the Divine blessing upon their guilty enterprises’.[167] But few agreed with him. Churches, chapels and synagogues were full throughout the land; and Thursday’s Times devoted four pages of small print to details of the sermons preached in 119 London parishes, 10 other places of worship in the capital, and selected cathedrals and minsters elsewhere. The Dean of St Paul’s chose as his text the first verse of Psalm 71: ‘In thee, O Lord, do I put my trust: let me never be put to confusion’. Nine weeks before, in a letter to his aunt in the Netherlands, the Tsarevich had selected that same passage, assuring her that, as ‘in 1812’, it was ‘the prayer that every Russian heart pronounces’.[168]

  By June in 1854 the mood of anticipatory elation which had gripped the British public in the spring was giving way to impatient criticism of the Government, inside and outside Parliament. Ministers were not waging war vigorously; some, notably Lord Aberdeen, were believed to be hankering after an armistice. The Prime Minister was attacked, in particular, for defending the reputation of the Tsar in the House of Lords against accusations of perfidy and the planning of a war of aggression. So indignant were Lord John Russell’s London constituents that they petitioned the Lord Mayor to summon a meeting at the Guildhall to press for a resolute prosecution of the war. Russell warned the Prime Minister privately that ‘the position of the Government has become precarious’. And in the last week of June, Punch, suspecting that Russell was prodding the Prime Minister, published a full-page cartoon depicting Aberdeen and Lord John as laundresses around a tub; the smaller washerwoman, Joanna, turns to the larger and asks, ‘When’s the fighting going to begin, Georgeana?’[169]

  For the moment it looked as if the answer might soon come from the Baltic, after all. Napoleon III was anxious for a success in northern waters, hoping that Sweden could still be encouraged to join the allies. A formidable army was concentrated around Boulogne to await transport in British vessels to the Baltic. Meanwhile Admiral Deschenes, who as a fifteen-year-old aspirant (midshipman) had served aboard the French flagship at Trafalgar, brought a squadron of fourteen vessels to join the British fleet in mid-June. On 20 June Admiral Napier felt able to inform their Lordships of the Admiralty that ‘the steam-squadron under my command...will sail tomorrow or the following day for Cronstadt, in company with the French Admiral and six of the line’; but, in a private letter to Sir James Graham, Napier indicated that he had little hope of the Russians coming out and accepting the challenge of a naval battle. He also thought it unlikely that he would be able to get close to Kronstadt itself.[170]

  Twenty-two allied vessels duly sailed into the Gulf of Finland and took up positions south of Kronstadt on 26 June; and, from the balcony of a waterside villa near the palace of Peterhof, ‘the entire enemy fleet was clearly visible’ to the imperial family ‘for several days’. Napier reconnoitred the fortress carefully before reporting back to London that ‘the difficulties of approach are great’ and that any assault ‘appears to me, with our means, perfectly impossible’. He thought, however, that the citadel might be attacked from the rear — provided that an army was first landed on the coast to seize St Petersburg itself. Napier also reported that Captain Hall in the small steam-vessel Hecla had bombarded Bomarsund on 21 June and he commended the courage of the steamship’s mate, Charles Lucas, who had picked up and thrown overboard a fused and live shell which had fallen on deck. At the same time Napier added that he was reprimanding Captain Hall for his assault on Bomarsund since he had chosen ‘to throw away all his shot and shell against stone walls’.[171] By contrast, Napier’s formidable allied squadron left the waters between Peterhof and Kronstadt on 4 July, without a shot being fired. This cautious fleet commander was not the legendary ‘Black Charley’ whose forthcoming triumphs the Reform Club had celebrated four months before.

  Napier’s report from off Kronstadt reached the Admiralty on 10 July. Next day he was assured that the Lords Commissioners had every confidence in him and ordered to look for other points where the enemy ‘may be more vulnerable’. Already Graham had suggested that a landing might be made in the Aaland Islands so as to capture and demolish Bomarsund. It was essential to make good use of 9,000 French troops who were to sail from Calais at the end of the week, watched by their Emperor in person.[172] But Graham, Palmerston and other members of the Government all recognized that Kronstadt, like Sebastopol, was the name that counted with newspaper readers in the country as a whole; and it was therefore with particular interest that the First Lord studied a memorandum sent to him by the retired Admiral Lord Dundonald, soon after the news was made public that the allied warships were sailing back down the Gulf of Finland.

  *

  Thomas Cochrane, tenth Earl of Dundonald, was the son of a Scottish peer who lost his personal wealth by indulging a scientific curiosity for chemical experiment. Cochrane, like Napier, had shown great enterprise as a captain in the Mediterranean during the Napoleonic Wars, but he fell foul of authority for criticizing naval administration and was imprisoned for twelve months in 1815 on a dubious charge of fraud, for which he was dismissed from the service and deprived of a knighthood and a seat in the Commons. His reputation was made in South American waters: he commanded the Chilean navy in 1817 and the Brazilian navy six years later. By 1827 he was founder-admiral of the Greek navy, though with less spectacular success. Eventually, during Sir James Graham’s first period of office at the Admiralty, Cochrane secured his reinstatement in the Royal Navy, receiving a free pardon in 1832, ten months after he succeeded his father in the earldom; and sixteen years later he became commander-in-chief of the squadron in the Atlantic, ‘the North American station’.

  Among Cochrane’s earlier exploits was an attack on the French fleet in Aix Roads in April 1809, using fireships and vessels filled with high explosive, and in the winter of 1811-12 he proposed to the Admiralty experiments with a primitive form of poison gas. It was this project which Dundonald elaborated in July, 1854, se
nding to Graham what he described as ‘a simple yet effective plan of operations showing that the maritime defences of Kronstadt (however strong against ordinary means) may be captured and their red hot shot and incendiaries, prepared for the destruction of our ships, turned on those they protect’. Dundonald proposed, in the first place, that a landing be made by allied troops under cover of ‘smoke vapours more obscure than the darkest night’. The smoke screen would be laid by specially modified shallow-draught steamers and would ‘conceal the ships from the batteries until they arrive at a proper position for beaching’. At a later stage ‘sulphurous craft’ would belch out fumes which would overwhelm the defenders of Kronstadt and, carried on a prevailing westerly wind, would also cause panic among the citizens of St Petersburg itself, sixteen miles away. Dundonald added that he was prepared to embark for the Baltic and serve there in any capacity to supervise preparations for the use of this secret weapon.[173]

  Graham at once referred Dundonald’s plan to Admiral Sir Byam Martin, whom he invited to preside over a committee which would evaluate the project. Martin, whose health was poor, consulted the army’s Inspector-General of Fortifications, Sir John Fox Burgoyne, who had returned from Turkey in April. The General, however, was a traditionalist, with little liking for new-fangled weapons of war, and he did not rate the chances of success highly; Burgoyne was especially concerned over the fate of assault troops should the wind suddenly change. Martin then turned for advice to the most eminent British scientist of his day, Professor Michael Faraday, at the Royal Institution. On 7 August Faraday confirmed that Dundonald’s proposals were ‘correct in theory’: ‘dense smoke will hide objects’; ‘burning sulphur will provide fumes...able to render men involved in them incapable of action, or even to kill them’. But he reminded Admiral Martin that ‘defenders could provide respirators’ if ‘they thought it was coming’. Martin’s committee were troubled by what they considered the inhumane character of Dundonald’s proposals; but, before the committee could reach a decision, its president was taken gravely ill and died in October. The icing up of the Baltic and the consequent retirement of the allied fleet enabled the Admiralty, with some relief, to shelve the Dundonald project. Chemical warfare was not to their liking. When next Dundonald offered his plan, almost exactly a year later, a different government was in office and it was Fort Malakoff that he wished to destroy.[174]