Then what? With England out of the way, the world would belong to Napoleon. He would be master of the seas, Emperor of all he surveyed. The West Indies would be his, rich in slaves and sugar. The route to India would again be open, and Canada and South Africa. Trade, commerce, profit, and no one to oppose him. He would make France the richest, greatest, most powerful country on the face of the earth. He would make it the world’s first and only superpower, far surpassing anything Caesar had known, with himself unrivalled at its head. The prospect was dazzling, to say the least.
There was, however, one small cloud on this agreeably sunny horizon.
Napoleon adjusted his telescope. Turning away from Dover, he refocused on a sight much closer to home – a line of warships cruising the open sea outside Boulogne harbour. The ships were Royal Navy vessels, blockading the port just out of range of the shore batteries. They had been there for more than a year, watching the French army’s every move. They were so close that they had heard the cheers for Napoleon and seen the banners waving around his throne.
Napoleon closed his telescope. The Royal Navy was an irrelevance. He had already devised a plan to get rid of the blockade. The ships would be lured away on false pretences, and while they were gone he would invade England behind their backs. His admirals had the details.
He consulted his watch. The party wasn’t over yet. By some accounts there was a grand finale still to come – the arrival of the invasion barges that would ferry his army across the Channel. Their arrival was a well-kept secret, a surprise to rally the troops. The barges would appear out of nowhere, to highly theatrical effect. The sailors manning them would leap ashore amid wild cheering to join forces with their brothers in the army, throwing their arms around each other and shedding brave tears. Then they would all march past Napoleon, the sailors leading the way with boarding axes at their shoulders. More than 100,000 soldiers and sailors would swing past the podium, while Napoleon took the salute from his throne. It would be a splendid climax to the day’s festivities.
But the flotilla was late. It should have arrived as Napoleon finished distributing the crosses. Something had held it up – perhaps the breeze that was getting stronger every minute, stirring up the waters of the Channel.
Laure Junot, wife of one of Napoleon’s generals, could see that something was wrong.
It was five o’clock, and for about an hour I had observed the Emperor turning repeatedly to M. Decrès, the Minister of Marine, and speaking to him in a low voice. Then he took a telescope and looked out to sea, as if he was hoping to see a distant sail. At length his impatience appeared to get the better of him. Berthier, too, who was biting his nails in spite of being a Marshal, was also looking out to sea. Junot was there as well, all of them talking privately among themselves. They were obviously waiting for something to happen.
At length the Minister of Marine got a message and immediately told the Emperor. Napoleon grabbed M. Decrès’ telescope so violently that it fell and rolled down the steps of the throne. We all looked in the same direction and saw a flotilla of between 1,000 and 1,200 boats, advancing towards Boulogne from the other nearby ports and Holland.
It was an armada, of sorts. The barges were flat-bottomed, specially designed for the invasion. They were part of a larger fleet that would amount to more than 2,000 vessels when it was fully assembled. The coast of northern France had seen nothing like it since the days of William the Conqueror.
Other accounts, perhaps downplaying the incident, put the number of vessels at only forty-seven, bringing more troops from Le Havre. Whatever the true figure, they made a stirring sight as they approached the shore. They would put the fear of God into the watching English, who would be in no doubt as to what the barges were for. So many landing craft so close to England could mean only one thing.
But then something happened, one of those unfortunate accidents that could befall anyone, if they don’t know what they’re doing. The officer leading the first division of the flotilla was unfamiliar with the waters. Instead of waiting for a pilot to guide him in, he pressed on regardless, not realising that there were some new coastal works in the shallows that didn’t appear on his chart. The leading barges bumped into them and promptly capsized. A number of soldiers vanished overboard, to loud cries of alarm from the watchers on land. The water was shallow, so most were able to make it ashore by themselves. Even so, one still managed to drown.
The onlookers rushed to help. Half of Boulogne hurried down to the seashore. They pulled the soldiers out of the water with a great deal of shouting and gesticulating, then turned their attention to the barges, now floating upside down on the swell. Admiral Decrès had warned Napoleon that the flat-bottomed design was not well suited to the open sea. But Napoleon hadn’t listened. He wasn’t interested in naval design.
Napoleon remained on his throne, appalled. To be humiliated thus, in front of the English! Caesar had had a slave at his elbow during his triumphs, whispering in his ear to remind him that he was still only mortal. Napoleon had the French navy.
Climbing down from his throne, he strode angrily towards the cliff top with Decrès and Marshal Berthier. The air was blue with obscenities as Napoleon watched the rescue operation. Onlookers agreed that he had not been in such a bad mood for a long time. There was to be a grand dinner for the soldiers that evening and a display of fireworks afterwards if the rain held off. Napoleon’s mood did not improve as the heavens opened and the rain came pouring down. It grew worse, if anything, because he was not going to forget this day for a long time to come. The sniggers of the English, as they enjoyed the antics of the flotilla, had been more than he could bear.
CHAPTER 2
BRITAIN AWAITS THE INVASION
On the other side of the Channel, at the precise point between Walmer and Deal that Napoleon had chosen for the invasion, an ill-assorted collection of ploughboys and fishermen stood waiting to repel him. There were 3,000 of them when they all turned up, many armed only with pikes or pitchforks. They were the Cinque Port Volunteers and their leader was the Prime Minister himself, Mr William Pitt. He had a farm nearby.
Anyone less suited to the task of hurling the French back into the sea would have been difficult to imagine. William Pitt was forty-five in the summer of 1804, a spindly bachelor with gout and a racking cough. He had first become Prime Minister at twenty-four and with one short break had continued so ever since. He was worn out with long years of politics and strife. All he really wanted to do now was to retire to his farm and spend the rest of his life improving the estate and putting his affairs in order.
Indeed, Pitt had already retired once, resigning the premiership in 1801 to Henry Addington, a close political colleague. At Amiens the following year, England and France had agreed a peace for the first time in almost a decade. But the peace had not lasted and the two countries were at war again. Addington was not up to the job of wartime leader, so Pitt had returned to office in May 1804 – the same week that Napoleon had been elected Emperor of France.
As well as Prime Minister, Pitt was also Warden of the Cinque Ports, the seven Kent and Sussex ports, originally five, that had enjoyed financial privileges in the Middle Ages in return for providing seamen and ships against the French. The job was supposed to be a sinecure, a way of pensioning off political figures approaching the end of their public lives. It came with a handsome salary and an official residence at Walmer Castle, overlooking the English Channel.
In time of war, however, it was no sinecure. As Warden, William Pitt now found himself in charge of the Cinque Port Volunteers, civilians in uniform with no military experience to speak of. Without enough muskets to go round, some of them did not even have proper weapons and were armed only with whatever they could lay their hands on. But if the French arrived off the Kent coast, they were all that stood between Napoleon and an unopposed landing on the beach between Walmer and Deal.
The precedents were not encouraging. In 55 BC, Julius Caesar had invaded Britain, almost certainl
y intending to land at Dover harbour. But the cliffs had been so sheer, and the ancient Britons so menacing, that his fleet had continued northwards for another seven miles until they reached the shingle beach between Walmer and Deal. The ancient Britons had kept pace with them on land, driving their chariots along the cliff tops. They waded into the sea when the Romans attempted to land, fighting hand-to-hand in the shallows. For a while it had been touch and go, the Romans experiencing much tougher resistance than they were used to. But then the standard-bearer of the 10th Legion had leapt into the water, encouraging others to leave their boats and follow him. The Britons had been forced back on to dry land. Once ashore, the Romans had rapidly asserted themselves. The Britons were defeated and very quickly sued for peace. Many feared the same would happen again if Napoleon ever managed to get his army ashore and safely established on English soil.
The French army was terrifying, as the English were the first to admit. Soon to be retitled the Grand Army, it was the finest military machine in the world. The English were amateurs by comparison. They did possess a modest professional force, backed by local militias and a system of volunteers that could be called upon in times of emergency, but nothing on the English side of the Channel could compare with the massed ranks of Frenchmen drilling ominously on the cliffs between Boulogne and Calais.
Partly, it was a question of money. The British had long been reluctant to pay for an army if they could possibly avoid it. But mostly it was a dislike of militarism that harked back to Cromwellian times – a visceral contempt for the rule of the major-generals who had subverted Parliament and chopped the king’s head off without any legitimate authority. If you had a powerful army, ran the argument, then sooner or later one of its generals would seize the throne and declare himself an emperor. That was all very well across the Channel, but in England it explained why commissions in the army were obtained by purchase rather than merit. Officers who could afford to buy their commissions came from the propertied classes and were unlikely to favour revolution. That many of them were not very good at their job was simply an unfortunate by-product of the system.
The polite name for such officers was ‘gentleman amateurs’. None fitted the bill more than Mr Pitt himself. He was no fool, but no soldier, either. Long years in Downing Street had left him ill-prepared for the cut and thrust of military life. His talents lay elsewhere.
Needs must, however, and Pitt wore his colonel’s uniform with pride. He took his duties very seriously, drilling the men every week and putting them through their paces along the Kent and Sussex coasts. His niece Hester Stanhope frequently accompanied him on his expeditions:
Mr Pitt absolutely goes through the fatigue of a drill-sergeant. It is parade after parade, at fifteen or twenty miles distant from each other. I often attend him, and it is quite as much as I am equal to . . . If Mr Pitt does not overdo it and injure his health every other consideration becomes trifling . . . He is thin but certainly strong, and his spirits are excellent . . . Mr Pitt is determined to remain acting Colonel when his regiment is called into the field.
Others were less impressed. ‘Can any thing equal the ridicule of Pitt riding about from Downing Street to Wimbledon, and from Wimbledon to Cox Heath, to inspect military carriages, impregnable batteries, and Lord Chatham’s reviews?’ asked his cousin Lord Grenville on 25 August. And Major-General John Moore, commanding the military base at Shorncliffe, was even more sceptical.
‘On the very first alarm I shall march to aid you, with my Cinque Port regiments,’ Pitt assured him there one day. ‘You have never told me where you will place us.’
‘Do you see that hill?’ Moore replied. ‘You and yours shall be drawn up on it. You will make a most formidable appearance to the enemy, while I, with the soldiers, shall be fighting on the beach.’
In truth, though, they would all be needed because there weren’t nearly enough troops to go round. The Roman beach between Walmer and Deal was not the only place where Napoleon might land. He was also considering the much longer beach north of Deal, stretching up to Margate. Or he could land in Sussex, as William the Conqueror had done, or Essex, or the West Country, or Ireland. With the advantage of surprise, he could land 100,000 men anywhere he liked within a few short hours, while the English were wrong-footed elsewhere. It was a nightmare for those on the British side trying to guess where he might come.
But the most obvious landing point was somewhere in Kent or Sussex, the thirty miles of coastline directly opposite Boulogne and the other invasion ports. It was here that the British had amassed as many troops as they dared, without leaving other parts of the country undefended. From Kent or Sussex, the French could be in London in five days. Logic dictated that this was where they were most likely to land.
The coast was spectacularly unprepared for an invasion. Apart from Dover Castle, a crumbling fort at Sandgate, and the ancient Tudor forts at Walmer and Deal, it had no permanent defences at all. The dockyard at Chatham was unprotected, as were Woolwich arsenal and the naval base at Deptford. If once the French got ashore, there would be very little to stop them marching straight for London. All that would stand between Napoleon and victory were a few battalions of regular troops and a much larger number of volunteers, some of whom really didn’t know one end of a musket from the other.
Part of the problem was the huge mass of volunteers. So many had offered their services – if only to avoid a compulsory ballot for the more onerous militia – that the government had been swamped. At first there weren’t enough uniforms to go round, let alone muskets. England had been at peace until quite recently. It would take time to get the country on a war footing again, fully prepared for an invasion. And time was something they didn’t have.
But the British were rallying, as they always did in times of crisis. If they didn’t have enough muskets, then anything else would suffice, as a notice cheerfully proclaimed:
You must train yourselves to wield a pitch-fork, or a hedgestake, if you cannot procure a musquet; practise the old English cudgel-play quarter staff: Assemble together, and learn to march, to wheel, to form companies, and, in short, to become half Soldiers – then, British Spirit and British Valour will supply the other half, and manifest themselves in a most formidable manner to the imperious, the ambitious, but powerful Foe!
Quite how long the Grand Army would be detained by a crowd of English yokels hacking at them with sticks was open to debate. ‘You might as well suppose that the enemy was to be kept off by bodkins or knitting needles,’ one Member of Parliament commented acidly. But sticks were all some of them had until more muskets arrived.
Their best hope of defeating the French was to be forewarned of their arrival. With enough notice of the invasion, the British could rush in reinforcements from elsewhere, hurrying troops to the spot to await the French landing. To this end, an elaborate early-warning system had been set up off the coast, composed of a chain of Royal Navy vessels primed for ship-to-shore communication. Once the invasion fleet had been sighted, the news could be relayed immediately to the shutter-telegraph station (a precursor of the semaphore) at Deal. From there, a short message – ‘100,000 French heading for Sandwich’ – could reach London in just a few minutes. The final telegraph station stood on the Admiralty roof in Whitehall. Once received, the message could be rushed across the parade ground to the Prime Minister’s office in Downing Street in another two or three minutes at most. With luck, London would know about the invasion before the French had even landed.
The shutter telegraph was supported by a network of beacons on every prominent hilltop – signal fires to announce the French arrival. There were fifteen beacons in Kent alone, among them Pluckley, Minster, Westwell and Lenham. Each was supplied with eight wagonloads of fuel and three or four barrels of tar. When the French came, they were to burn wood by night to produce a bright light, damp hay by day to produce thick smoke. The beacons were identified by a large pole in the middle, flying a white flag from the top.
From K
ent, the beacons branched outwards to all parts of the country, everywhere from Cornwall to Scotland. Each stood within two or three miles of the next, in direct line of sight. From the Kentish coast they ran west to Sussex and north-west to the River Thames, and from there across the water to Essex, Hertfordshire and beyond. Where there were no hills, as in East Anglia, other means of signalling had been devised. The village of Great Snoring in Norfolk employed a large red flag on the church tower for the purpose, as did Mum’s Hedge and Sewers End in Essex. But most parts of the country could be reached by beacon. The system had worked well during the Spanish Armada scare of 1588. It would work again when the French fleet appeared over the horizon.
For the inhabitants of the Kentish coast, however, none of this provided much comfort. They were first in line for attack, and they knew it. The Grand Army was camped out on the cliffs between Calais and Boulogne, its rows of whitewashed huts plainly visible to the people of Dover and Folkestone. Many of Folkestone’s citizens had fled inland after one of Napoleon’s visits to Boulogne. The French town had been illuminated for the occasion, its lights shining so brightly across the Channel that the English had assumed the worst. There had been similar scares at Dover and Eastbourne, people packing up their valuables and fleeing the coast, putting as much distance as possible between themselves and the French. They did not want to be there when the Grand Army landed.
Fear of Napoleon lay at the bottom of it, the great bogeyman of Europe. The French army was nothing without its leader. As one of his subordinates shrewdly observed, ‘Napoleon’s great-coat and hat placed on the end of a pole on the coast at Brest would make Europe run to arms from one end to another.’ No one disagreed, least of all the British. He was the man they all hated – a Corsican, and according to The Times, a tyrant, usurper, and Mediterranean bandit without morals or scruple. A menace to civilisation and decent people everywhere.
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