Trafalgar

by Nicholas Best

  Moore was a frequent guest at the castle. He commanded the Light Infantry brigade at Shorncliffe, near Hythe, and was highly intelligent for an army officer. He and Pitt got on well. Moore was full of ideas for improving the army, everything from camouflage and a revision of tactics to the use of rifles by the infantry instead of smooth-bore muskets. He didn’t think much of Pitt’s Volunteers, but had plenty of confidence in his own troops, so much so that he advocated offensive action against the French, a policy of carrying the war to the enemy instead of being permanently on the defensive. He considered a military attack on Boulogne perfectly feasible. He also pressed the case for Martello towers, drawing on his own experience in Corsica. Pitt listened to everything he had to say, and valued his opinion.

  Pitt listened to others as well, a constant procession of militia colonels, sea captains and undercover agents who dined at his table. Walmer was the de facto headquarters for operations against the French. All sorts of people arrived to give him their views, some of them amateur, some professional. A great many of the militia colonels were simply landowners, with no real idea of what they were talking about. But they were accustomed to being heard because of their standing in society. Pitt listened to them patiently, as he listened to everyone else.

  He listened to relatively junior officers, too, often with unorthodox ideas. To the dismay of Admiral Lord Keith, in command of the home waters, Pitt had long taken an interest in clandestine operations against the French, a war of secret agents and gold bullion aimed at fomenting an anti-Napoleonic movement in France. The Pas de Calais was a staunchly Royalist area, whose people had never approved of the Revolution or the execution of Louis XVI. They approved of Napoleon even less and looked to Britain for help in getting rid of him. So did people elsewhere in France, even in the army. Quite a few generals despaired of Napoleon, resenting the way this obscure Corsican had seized command of the armed forces and now declared himself Emperor as well. With help from the British, they might be persuaded to overthrow Napoleon before he was crowned and restore the monarchy instead. Anything to distract them from invading England.

  In fact, something of the sort had recently been tried, with disastrous results. In August 1803, the Royal Navy had landed the Royalist General Georges Cadoudal on the French coast near Abbeville. He had been joined in January 1804 by General Charles Pichegru, once a colleague of Napoleon’s but now a bitter opponent. The two of them had set off for Paris to organise the tyrant’s assassination, but had been caught and imprisoned. Pichegru was too popular with the army to be executed publicly, so Napoleon had had him strangled instead – probably by four Mamelukes, who were immediately shot in turn to prevent them talking. He then announced that Pichegru had committed suicide.

  Cadoudal had been guillotined in June. Some 354 other conspirators had also been arrested, among them the Duc d’Enghien, heir to the Bourbon dynasty. D’Enghien almost certainly had nothing to do with the plot against Napoleon and was living peaceably in the neutral territory of Baden. But he was the descendant of French kings, and that was enough to condemn him in Napoleon’s eyes. He had been kidnapped from Baden in March 1804 and shot out of hand in the moat at Vincennes – a cold-blooded murder that had outraged all of Europe. It had been a bad mistake on Napoleon’s part, because it had lost him widespread support among influential people who had hitherto seen him as a force for good. His own wife Josephine had been appalled by the murder, as had Fouché, his Minister of Police. So had Ludwig van Beethoven, who had just composed his Third Symphony in Napoleon’s honour. Unimpressed by the murder, or by Napoleon’s imperial pretensions, Beethoven had retitled it the ‘Eroica’ Symphony instead.

  Despite the executions, however, the threat to Napoleon had not been extinguished. The rumblings had continued, so much so that for a time Napoleon had been afraid to appear in public. The British had been delighted, doing everything they could to make things worse for him. Charles Talleyrand, the French foreign minister, had lodged a formal protest, accusing the British of interfering in France’s internal affairs by plotting to assassinate Napoleon and overthrow his government. The British had huffed and puffed, but had been unable to deny this diplomatic faux pas. ‘It is an acknowledged Right of Belligerent Powers to avail themselves of any discontents existing in the countries with which they happen to be at war,’ they had claimed. In any case, the French were doing the same with the rebels in Ireland.

  Pitt himself had kept aloof from plans to assassinate Napoleon, but was privately sympathetic to the idea of destabilising his regime. It had not escaped his notice that the cheapest way to thwart Napoleon’s invasion plans would be to get rid of the man himself by financing his enemies at home. To this end, large quantities of gold coin had been stored at Walmer Castle, to be smuggled into France by night. There were numerous secret landing places along the coast between Calais and Boulogne, and the Royal Navy knew them all. The navy was well used to running bullion ashore, and spies, both English and French. Its cloak-and-dagger operations greatly annoyed Admiral Lord Keith, who preferred a more open kind of warfare, fully above board. He was annoyed also that the operations were run by officers much junior to himself, who appeared to have Pitt’s approval for their activities. Lord Keith found the whole business highly irregular.

  But Pitt was always open to new ideas, however unorthodox. Among those who came to see him at Walmer was the American inventor Robert Fulton. They had breakfast together while Fulton tried to interest Pitt in ‘a submarine expedition to destroy the fleets of Boulogne and Brest’. Fulton had already designed several submarines and a range of torpedoes. He was convinced they would do great damage, if the Royal Navy would only give him the go-ahead.

  Fulton was a remarkable man. Initially enthused by the French Revolution, he had gone to Paris in 1797 to try to sell his submarine to the French as a way of breaking the British blockade of French ports. In 1800 he had built a submarine called the Nautilus, with a crew of three and a hand-cranked propeller four feet wide. Tests on the Seine and at Brest had been encouraging, but with peace coming the French had not been interested in his plan to blockade the Thames with a fleet of submersible warships.

  Fulton had turned his mind to steam power instead. After the resumption of hostilities, he had attempted to interest Napoleon in a flotilla of paddle steamers to tow the invasion barges across the Channel, but again without success. In May 1804, therefore, Fulton had allowed himself to be wooed to London, where the maritime British were far more receptive to his ideas. They at once granted him a licence to work on steamship design, and took a keen interest in his other projects as well.

  The Royal Navy’s view of his submarines was that they might well work, but would probably be more trouble than they were worth. Rather more promising were his torpedoes, boat-shaped ‘carcasses’ loaded with gunpowder and a clockwork fuse. Over breakfast at Walmer, Fulton persuaded the Prime Minister that these were just the job to set among the French in Boulogne harbour. A few torpedoes could cause untold damage to the tightly packed invasion vessels. Pitt agreed, not least because Admiral Keith disapproved of Fulton. A few days after the meeting, the American had received a contract for the development and production of torpedoes in several different designs. He was hard at work now, using the nom de guerre of ‘Mr Francis’ in case his erstwhile French employers got wind of what he was up to.

  But Fulton’s were not the only ideas for attacking the French at Boulogne. Another American named Mumford had proposed sinking blockships loaded with stone in the harbour mouth, to keep the invasion fleet bottled up. Someone else had suggested rocket-carrying balloons, to be released over Boulogne at night and detonated by clockwork. Others put their faith in fireships, launched against the French exactly as they had been against the Spanish Armada. There was no shortage of ideas for carrying the war to the French. Pitt’s task as Prime Minister was to choose between them, deciding which of the many schemes were worth pursuing.

  Pitt was a lifelong bachelor, but he did no
t live alone at Walmer. With him as he grappled with invasion problems was his niece, Lady Hester Stanhope. She acted as his hostess at dinner, presiding at the other end of the table as Pitt entertained his generals and admirals, retiring afterwards to the drawing room with the ladies while the men sat over the port and discussed strategy. Hester Stanhope was twenty-eight in 1804, a forthright character who had quarrelled with her father and had little money of her own. She had taken advantage of the Peace of Amiens to travel abroad, but had returned to England in 1803 with nowhere to go. Pitt had taken pity on her and invited her to live with him, even though it meant changing the habits of a lifetime.

  To his surprise, the relationship had prospered. Hester was his sister’s child, a difficult woman who irritated many people while captivating others, but she and Pitt had taken to each other at once. She adored him, and he looked upon her as a daughter. They shared a roof quite happily together.

  For Hester, the idea of being invaded by the French was too thrilling for words. It was wonderful to be a part of it, so close to Walmer and everything that was going on:

  Bonaparte was said to be at Boulogne a few days ago; the officers patrolled all night with the men, which was pleasant. I have my orders how to act in case of real alarm in Mr Pitt’s absence, and also a promise from him never to be further from the army than a two hours’ ride. This is all I wish. I should break my heart to be driven up the country like a sheep when everything I most love was in danger.

  She often accompanied Pitt on his inspections of the Volunteers, sometimes riding twenty miles at a stretch without complaint – ‘the hard riding I do not mind, but to remain almost still so many hours on horseback is an incomprehensible bore’. And she had been with him when one of Napoleon’s flat-bottomed barges was captured in the Channel and brought back to England.

  As soon as she came in Mr Pitt, Charles, Lord Camden and myself took a Deal boat and rowed alongside of her. She had two large guns on board, thirty soldiers, and four sailors. She is about thirty feet long, and only draws about four feet of water; an ill-contrived thing, and so little above the water that, had she as many men on board as she could really carry, a moderate storm would wash them overboard.

  Having seen enough of their rascally regiments, I certainly pronounce these picked men. They were well clothed and provided with everything – an immense cask of brandy, and a certain quantity of provisions. They appeared neither low nor mortified at being stared at or talked to, nor did they sham spirits. They simply said they should be retaken, for it would all be over in less than two months . . .

  The Frenchmen thought one of the Volunteers guarding them so puny that they advised him to go home and eat more pudding.

  But it was British troops, rather than the rascally French, who had given Lady Hester her most exciting moment of the invasion so far. On a visit to Ramsgate with her maid, she was accosted one day by some troopers of the Royal Horse Guards, plainly the worse for wear:

  Five of the Blues, half-drunk, not knowing who I was, walked after me, and pursued me to my door. They had the impertinence to follow me upstairs, and one of them took hold of my gown.

  Lady Hester’s maid shrank back, terrified, but her mistress was equal to the occasion. The Prime Minister’s niece did what any well-bred Englishwoman would have done in the circumstances. She turned around and punched the man hard, right in the face.

  I sent him rolling over the others down stairs, with their swords rattling against the balusters. Next day, he appeared with a black patch as big as a saucer over his face; and, when I went out, there were the glasses looking at me, and footmen pointing me out – quite a sensation!

  Lady Hester Stanhope would be taking no prisoners if the French army landed anywhere near her.

  CHAPTER 8

  SPYING OUT THE LAND

  Off Boulogne, the Royal Navy remained on full alert after Napoleon’s departure for Aix, convinced that he might double back at any moment and launch the invasion. It was obvious that something was in the wind, with all the military activity on shore.

  The navy’s chief concern was the assembly of invasion barges moored in the inner harbour. They were protected from the open sea by a double line of warships anchored nose to tail across the harbour mouth. The warships in turn were protected by a formidable array of gun batteries along the cliff tops. A frontal assault against such a target would have been suicidal, which was why the navy was taking such an interest in Robert Fulton’s torpedoes and other clandestine means of warfare.

  Early in August, the Immortalité – a captured French frigate now commanded by Captain Edward Owen – had arrived off Boulogne with a mysterious passenger on board. He never gave his name and no one dared ask – the midshipmen called him Mr Nobody for want of anything better. Their mission was to sail as close to Boulogne as possible, so that their passenger could study the port’s layout and make sketches of the defences. It was a hazardous undertaking, as sixteen-year-old midshipman Abraham Crawford recalled:

  During the fortnight that this gentleman passed on board the Immortalité, she was kept constantly close inshore, whenever the state of the tide and weather would permit, in order to give him an opportunity of pursuing certain researches upon which he seemed intent, and which, to give him his due praise, he did with the greatest earnestness and coolness, unruffled and undisturbed by the showers of shot and shells that fell around the ship, splashing the water about her at every instant. The object of this scrutiny seemed to be to ascertain, as correctly as he could, the fortifications around Boulogne, and the position and bearings of the different batteries which faced the sea, and also the exact distance at which the flotilla in the roads was anchored from the shore.

  Mr Nobody may have been unruffled by the bombardment, but the ship’s crew was less amused. The men resented his presence if it drew so much attention to themselves. They wondered who he was, and why he wanted to know so much about Boulogne’s defences. They were glad to see the back of Mr Nobody when at last he decided he had seen enough and asked to be taken back to England.

  The Immortalité was back off Boulogne by the middle of August, exchanging fire with the French flotilla. As Crawford remembered it, they were harried for three days in a row by the French, responding with unaccustomed vigour to the presence of British ships so close inshore:

  The enemy, although he did not venture from under the shelter of his batteries, was unusually bold, and boats, having officers of rank on board them, were seen frequently to pass along their line. From these circumstances it was thought that Bonaparte was present at the time, and that, under the eye of their newly elected Emperor, they fought with a resolution and boldness unknown to them before.

  This was Napoleon’s trip to Boulogne to review his forces and distribute the Légions d’honneur. It was a relief to everyone when he took himself off to Aix, leaving both sides free to relax again. Even so, the British remained on high alert. They were convinced something important was going to happen soon. Why else were Mr Nobody and others like him taking such a keen interest in the defences of Boulogne?

  The Grand Army had arrived at the same conclusion. With so much British activity along the coast, so many spies and saboteurs being put ashore, something was certainly being planned. Whatever it was, the Grand Army was determined not to be taken by surprise when it happened.

  The area between Boulogne and Calais teemed with British spies. The Royal Navy was putting them ashore almost every day. A surprising number were French – Royalists with little love for Napoleon or the Revolution. They did not love the English either, but saw them as useful allies in the struggle to restore the French monarchy. The English were a libertarian people who had restored their own monarch after the unfortunate incident with Charles I. They did not desecrate churches or guillotine the innocent, as French revolutionaries had done. They also had plenty of gold, which they distributed generously to anyone prepared to help overthrow Napoleon.

  But most of the spies were English, sent ash
ore by the Royal Navy to inspect the defences of Boulogne and the other invasion ports. They desperately needed information about the ports and the invasion fleet – how many barges each port had, how many men they held, what kind of guns they carried, what kind of keel. They needed to know how the warships were painted (useful for recognition at sea), how they were rigged, how deep they lay in the water. They needed the enemy’s signal codes and newspapers, access to local gossip. The only way to gather such information was to send people in to see what they could learn.

  So the area teemed with spies, both English and French. They came in a variety of disguises, with telescopes hidden in their boots and maps sewn into the lining of their waistcoats. By night they signalled to the Royal Navy from the cliff tops, opening and closing windows or waving lights in a prearranged pattern. They came and went in the dark, sneaking ashore in a Royal Navy cutter or else rowing out to sea with the latest newspapers from Paris. The deserted beaches north of Boulogne were ideal for clandestine operations of that kind.

  It was the Grand Army’s job to stop them. The troops kept constant watch along the cliff tops, looking out for landing parties or signals from the coast – bonfires or flashing lights answered by English ships out at sea. The army identified the most likely landing places along the shore and ambushed them at night. Once, they found two small boats on the beach, hidden under canvas. Another time, a spent signal rocket lying in a field. They had had their most spectacular success in June, when they captured no fewer than eight spies – eight well-dressed Englishmen carrying sulphur matches hidden in their clothes that could have been used for setting fire to the invasion barges. The English were shot within the hour. They found a Boulogne schoolmaster as well, signalling with his arms on the cliff top facing out to sea. The man protested his innocence, but with letters in his pocket connecting him to the enemy was executed next day.