This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  In 1793 a young artillery lieutenant was responsible for the capture of the Royalist fortress seaport of Toulon. In Paris, Robespierre took note of this young Corsican officer whose name was Napoleon Bonaparte. France would need an imaginative commander. An alliance of Europeans against France was set up. It was called the First Coalition and consisted of Britain, Holland, Spain, Austria and Prussia. But it was not a success because each member was too busy looking after its own interests. In the British Isles, Pitt’s apparent lack of immediate concern was not reflected in, for example, assaults on freedoms when he suspended habeas corpus, sacred to the British code of the rights of man. Habeas Corpus (Latin: you may have the body) was a thirteenth-century writ that was mainly used to settle legal conflicts between the courts of equity and common law. It demanded that anyone who detained (imprisoned) a person should produce that person at court within a specific time together with the reason for the detention. By the time of Henry VII (1457–1509) the writ was used, in theory, to protect the individual from wrongful imprisonment. Like most Acts, this was amended, particularly in 1679 when loopholes in the law were removed and, going on from our immediate period, in 1816 and again as late as 1960 when the Act was strengthened; for example, the occasions when the Act could be set aside were limited.

  Of course, any government had the power to suspend habeas corpus in extreme situations of national security. In 1794, with the French Revolutionary War under way, Pitt thought the security of the nation threatened enough to suspend habeas corpus. Why would he do that? He was concerned about sedition and espionage, and therefore felt the need to lock up a suspicious character and deny that person access to the law until the administration felt it safe to let the detainee have access to that freedom. Thus, it was a sure sign that Pitt’s administration felt the King’s rule was threatened. The situation in Europe was no safer because of promises of coalitions against France. Promises were empty. The partners in the First Coalition against France were in disarray. The Low Countries, with one British ally, the Prussians, were more interested in sharing the partition of Poland with the Russians. The Prussians then made a peace agreement (to consolidate their Polish gains) and sat out the war in selfish neutrality. The Austrians followed to pick over the Polish bones while the French armies drove into Spain and Holland, which became known as the Batavian Republic. The Spanish, sensing the course of the war, also deserted the First Coalition. If all this wasn’t enough, the British Royal Navy failed to dominate the sea-lanes. And the navy mutinied twice.

  In April 1797, conditions of service in the navy were so bad that the Channel Fleet, at Spithead, refused to put out sea. Within a few days, many of the demands of the ratings were granted. This encouraged the North Sea Fleet to mutiny at the Nore, and so, for weeks, it was the Royal Navy and not the French that virtually blockaded the Thames. The conditions in which ratings lived on the lower decks in the eighteenth century were appalling. Pay was often infrequent (partly to prevent sailors leaving the ship and never returning). The ships themselves were riddled with disease. A wounded man was often put ashore without any compensation and not even pay. And so the men mutinied. There were hangings aplenty. The French were in the Channel and a squadron was heading for Ireland, so the Admiralty Board responded quickly in order ‘that the Fleet should speedily put to sea to meet the enemy of the country’. The Board said that it understood the grievances and wages were raised to four shillings a month extra for petty officers and able seamen, three shillings a month extra for ordinary seamen and two shillings a month for landmen. Wounded sailors would continue to be paid. But the Spithead sailors weren’t satisfied. They pushed once more at the Board’s eagerness to reach agreement before there was another disagreement with the French. The demands of the Spithead sailors were coped with but those of the North Sea Fleet were not settled so easily. The Nore mutineers, as they were known, did not surrender for four weeks. But it was clear that England, as ever, needed its navy. When the fleet finally put to sea, they won the Battle of Camperdown and stopped the Dutch invasion of England.

  But for one man in particular, the Nore and Spithead mutinies were of little immediate interest. In 1797, Commodore Horatio Nelson had just been promoted to Rear Admiral, was about to be knighted and, within months, he, the nation and the wife of Sir William Hamilton would be celebrating his destruction of the French fleet at the mouth of the River Nile; this ruined Napoleon Bonaparte’s ambitions to invade Egypt and thus interrupt British trade routes to and from the Far East, threaten British India and extend his empire to the sub-continent. Like Bismarck in the next century, Napoleon saw the taking of territory as a mark of progress. Nelson knew well the naval role of disrupting enemy ambition, ideally by stopping the enemy fleet from putting to sea and, when they did so, defeating them and taking ships as prizes. (Hence the many French names on ships of the Royal Navy.)

  Nelson’s story is the tale of a typical British hero. Not well born, he overcomes disabilities and he is criticized by superiors, the victim of jealousy, unconventional and loved by the people better than he is regarded by authority; he then dies in a crucial battle and so achieves his finest hour and legendary status.

  Nelson was born in Norfolk in 1758, two years after the Black Hole of Calcutta and in the same year as Halley’s Comet was seen. He was twelve when he joined his first ship, the Raisonnable, a ship captured from the French in the days when the Royal Navy rarely changed ships’ names. She was a fine ship for Nelson and for her captain, Maurice Suckling. Suckling just happened to be Nelson’s uncle, otherwise Nelson, who was a feeble child, might never have been taken into the navy at all.

  In the summer of that year, 1771, Nelson transferred to the Triumph, and then to a merchant ship bound for the West Indies. When England went to war with the American colonies, so did Nelson. By 1787, he had commanded four ships and had married Frances Nisbet. But the following year he was unemployed. In those days, if an officer didn’t have a ship, then the best he could hope for was to go ashore on half-pay. It wasn’t until January 1793, only four weeks before France declared war, that the Admiralty called Nelson back. He took command of the Agamemnon, the ship he loved more than any other, including the Victory. The following year he was wounded in his right eye in the Corsican campaign at Calvi, and eventually lost its sight. In 1797 he became a rear admiral, a knight of the Bath and, at Santa Cruz, lost his right arm. And so now, in 1798, it was a half-sighted, one-armed, diminutive, glory-seeking, prone-to-sea-sickness junior admiral who hoisted his pennant in the Vanguard and started searching the Mediterranean for the French fleet as Bonaparte rampaged through Continental Europe.

  The northern provinces of what we call Italy (it did not become a single State until 1861) had fallen; Venice was degraded into a separate province of Austria. Napoleon would soon have an idea to invade Britain. He was already thinking of doing what only the Norman had done. Napoleon wanted to turn a murky tidal river at Boulogne into a massive invasion port. He did not abandon this idea until the summer of 1805. Pitt knew this. No wonder, outward appearances aside, Pitt was taking the war with France far more seriously than some imagined. And it was not as if England had no other worries. There was real rebellion in Ireland. The concept of Catholic Emancipation was a major issue that could destabilize the politics as well as the constitutional stability of the British.

  However, in 1798 the single British ambition was to bring about Napoleon’s defeat. Nelson believed that could be best achieved at sea. The French fleet of thirteen capital ships, each armed with 74 guns, and four smaller vessels was commanded by Admiral François-Paul Brueys d’Aigailliers, usually referred to as Admiral Paul Brueys. Nelson found the fleet at anchor midstream in the shoals at Aboukir Bay, just to the east of Alexandria. The French thought themselves safe among the shoals. Nelson, his flag in the Vanguard, went in shortly before sunset with six ships to one side of the French line, six the other. The battle went on through the night until shortly after six in the morning.

 
It was a grand and an awful spectacle. Admiral Brueys was seen flopped in a chair, both legs shot off, still trying to direct operations. A further salvo saved him further pain. His captain refused to leave the deck. His ten-year-old son was trapped below in the fire. Four French vessels managed to escape to sea including the Guillaume Tell, commanded by Rear Admiral Pierre-Charles Villeneuve who would face Nelson once more, at Trafalgar as commander of the whole French fleet. As Nelson wrote in his dispatch, ‘My Lord, Almighty God has blessed His Majesty’s Arms in the late Battle by a great victory over the Fleet of the Enemy.’ The importance of his battle was that it stopped Napoleon building a communications line between France and Asia. And the Royal Navy was now in Malta, and so could stay in the Mediterranean all year round instead of returning the fleet to home waters every winter. However, in spite of the naval victory, the land battle was very much going Napoleon’s way. Britain had allies but they were not very good against the superior strategy of the Corsican. Moreover, the war was taking a lot of money and the allies demanded even more to take on the land role that the British felt they themselves could not pursue at a large scale. Britain’s main contribution was at sea, with Nelson hunting for the new Mediterranean fleet and, later, the brilliant admiral William Cornwallis blockading the main French fleet in Brest – for two years.

  It was a problem for the government that many of those shopkeepers, their customers, suppliers, landlords and tenants were not making a big enough contribution. Money had been raised by barons from their peasantry and by counties from the landowners, and even windows had been taxed. Pitt had already tried to raise money by trebling the taxes on luxuries – for example, on hair powder, horses and servants. But now, Pitt – a politician, not a monarch – proposed the most obvious and universal means of raising money for war. On 3 December 1798, William Pitt gave the House news of the first graduated income tax.

  It is my intention to propose that a general tax shall be imposed upon all the leading branches of income. I trust that all who value the national honour and the national safety will co-operate in obtaining by an efficient and comprehensive tax upon real ability, every advantage which flourishing and invigorated resources can confer upon national efforts. It is my intention to propose that no income under £60 a year shall be called upon to contribute and the scale of modification up to £200 a year shall be introduced.

  Income tax had arrived at two shillings in the pound. Pitt wanted 10 per cent from everyone earning more than £60 a year. And at the end of the eighteenth century there was a larger population to be taxed.

  The century began with a population of less than six million, but by the end of the century it was more than ten million. And by 1800 the National Debt, which had been about £19 million at the beginning of the century, was closer to £500 million. However there had been a 400 per cent increase in cotton output and a four-fold increase in coal mining; the steam engine was invented, the first canal opened and the first edition of The Times was printed. And it was the century of the Georges, the third of whom they said was insane.

  However, the momentous event at the end of the century was the Union of Great Britain with Ireland. It was more than a significant constitutional moment. Ireland and Britain joined together because Ireland was, to the British, fast becoming a failed State in rebellion. The object of that rebellion was the so-called Protestant Ascendancy that ruled Ireland and therefore the British rule itself. The Protestant Ascendancy was the almost entirely Protestant/Anglican organization that ruled a nation island that was 75 per cent Roman Catholic. The rebellion came not from the Catholics but was initiated from a Presbyterian-based movement known as the United Irishmen (see p.405). This group was the spearhead for those who wanted change and even a republican rebellion against the British – the period was within a decade of the French Revolution. A further issue was the role of religion in the politics of both Ireland and Britain that would eventually bring about Union through the 1800 Act of Union.

  The short answer is that religion identity in Britain and Ireland influenced political and social reform at the time of Union between the two kingdoms. Every faction in Ireland, unlike the rest of the British Isles, had religious labelling. From this alone, the easy parallels with the late twentieth-century Troubles in Northern Ireland become obvious.

  During the second half of the eighteenth century, Protestant England appeared confident in its own identity and its peoples displayed a global colonial and Protestant arrogance so much so that they characterized predominantly Catholic states as poverty-ridden; the British were showing that only Protestants could enjoy a true and lasting prosperity. Recently, historian Linda Colley has written, ‘British Protestantism was not a matter of faith but their assumed superiority of their Christian denomination. Therefore, the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland existed because the ruling class were Anglican Protestants. They had no role as religious proselytizers.’45 Colley’s accepted view should be read with the anxieties of Britain’s ruling classes. Protestant arrogance could only palliate a formidable mix of not always successful British experiences, as follows: the American War of Independence (1775–83); the strengthening of the Evangelical movement and its political influences; Papal recognition of the Hanoverian monarchy and therefore a tentative relaxation of restrictions on Catholics (1776); the refusal in the 1780s of the Irish Parliament to contribute to the Royal Navy and ease trade restrictions; the French Revolution (1789–99); the Society of United Irishmen (October 1791) inspired by the French Revolution; the execution of Louis XVI (1793), England being no stranger to the consequences of regicide; war with France (1793–1815); the constant fear of French invasion through Ireland (a token landing at Killala in August 1798) and via Boulogne to the English southern coast (Napoleon did not abandon his plan to launch the invasion of England until August 1805); and finally, the Irish Rebellion (1798).

  By the 1790s, the three main reasons for political anxieties were: an overstretched war economy; war with France; anarchy in Ireland.

  Pitt’s solution was Union with Ireland and a form of Catholic Emancipation (with voting powers but no representation in Parliament). Protestant England was acknowledging the political influence of not so much Roman Catholicism as a faith, but the majority of the islanders who opposed Protestantism as a ruling elite rather than a religious persuasion. Pitt did not see constitutional and political Union as any form of religious ecumenism.

  England and Ireland had been in personal Union – when two states may share the head of state and legislation but are recognized internationally as separate states – since 1542, when Henry VIII became King of Ireland under the Crown of Ireland Act. A similar arrangement existed between Scotland and England following the accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England (1603) until the 1707 Act dissolved the personal Union and created Scotland and England as the Kingdom of Great Britain. This might have been the opportunity constitutionally to tidy up the British Isles and two years later, 1709, the Irish House of Lords unsuccessfully petitioned for Ireland to join a Kingdom of Great Britain.

  The petition was complicated by Irish insistence on effective representation in the English Parliament along the lines reasoned by William Molyneux (1656–98), an MP for Trinity College Dublin who had insisted that Ireland should not be legislated by Westminster without proper representation in London – the model used by the American colonists in their demand ‘no taxation without representation’.

  Throughout the Seven Years War (1756–63) Britain saw Ireland as a backdoor for a French invasion and so, Union became attractive to Britain – but not to Ireland. Henry Grattan (1746–1820) and his Patriot Party led the opposition. Instead of Union, Grattan achieved limited legislative independence in 1782. Grattan was part of the Protestant Ascendancy and supported the Crown but wanted Parliamentary reform and Catholic Emancipation (which George III did not).

  By the 1790s, Ireland was becoming a failing State and breeding open rebellion by a mix of Presbyterian and Catholic De
fenders. The Defenders dated from the 1780s. They were Catholic vigilantes formed in Armagh to defend their people against the Protestant Boys (later the Orange Order). Following the Ulster cleansing of Catholics in the mid-1790s, the Defenders moved with other Catholics to Leinster and Connaught. They were natural allies of rebellious Presbyterians against the ruling Protestant Ascendancy.

  In 1791, Wolfe Tone (1763–98) and other Protestant radicals in Belfast, inspired by the French Revolution and republican democracy in America, founded the Society of United Irishmen. This was not a Catholic led group. For example, the twelve backers of the Society’s own newspaper, the Northern Star were almost all Presbyterians. Here was a reminder that the mix of Christian Churches throughout the British Isles could not be simplified in terms of the Established Church of England versus Roman Catholics and Dissenters in some continuous quasi-religious war.

  The Established Church of England was (and remains) the State religion under Parliamentary control. In the 1600s the increased authority of the High Church (almost Anglo-Catholics) unwittingly encouraged anti-Episcopal sentiment and had much to do with the confrontation between Parliament and Charles I. During the Commonwealth, a form of Puritanism was preferred; the Book of Common Prayer was withdrawn and Puritans were found throughout the New Model Army. With the Restoration (1660) Puritanism became part of the Non-conformist churches and by the mid-1700s the Evangelical movement was building on the traditions of the Puritan beliefs surviving in the Anglican Church and was increasingly seen as influential in campaigning for political reform. Its influence was also part of the transatlantic revival in the 1730s.46

  Unlike the Irish Roman Catholics, the 80,000 English Catholics were led by a secular aristocracy rather than its clergy, who numbered not many more than 400, and were not a political consideration. If there were any political concerns, they had more to do with how English Catholics might react to Irish Catholic Emancipation.