Napoleon, as we have seen, planned to invade southern England; Nelson was in the Mediterranean trying to find the French southern commander, Villeneuve, but he was already in the Atlantic, joined by six Spanish ships, and was sailing westward. By the middle of May 1805, Villeneuve was at Martinique – coincidentally, the birthplace of Napoleon’s wife, Josephine. Three weeks later Nelson reached Barbados. Villeneuve heard of this and set sail: he was seen heading towards the Bay of Biscay. The French were then intercepted, not by Nelson, but by a squadron commanded by Vice Admiral Sir Robert Calder, which forced them south. If Calder had destroyed Villeneuve’s fleet instead of being more interested in prize ships, the Battle of Trafalgar would not have taken place, Nelson would not have been killed and British history would have been quiet differently recorded. We might remember that although Trafalgar was a remarkable battle, it was the culmination of a campaign spread across hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean, and conducted without the benefit of modern technology. It is worth pausing to see the mischief to history that Calder’s action caused.
By 22 July 1805 Villeneuve was disillusioned and tired. Led by this frightened and inept man who, to be kind, could be described as a realist, the combined Franco–Spanish fleet was making little headway towards the imagined safety of El Ferrol when, late that morning, its guard ships reported that a British line of warships lay ahead. This was a considerable part of Calder’s reinforced squadron.
The importance of this part of the story is fog or, at least, a July Atlantic mist from the cold sea and a sun which had yet to burn off the haze. This was not quite naval blind man’s bluff. There was no indication around noon that day that Villeneuve behaved anything else but correctly. Because neither fleet could properly see each other, it meant the mist was relatively settled. This tells us that there was very little wind. That being so, it must have been extraordinarily difficult to deploy as a fighting force and manoeuvre into any position that could effectively make or counter an attack. They probably did not really know the size and gunnery of each other. The best commanders in these circumstances make the higher assessment. Reasonably, they both decided that the other had about the same number of ships.
Villeneuve had twenty ships of the line, that is, big ships, and seven frigates in three columns. This was not a so-called battle-line. This would have been a cruising formation. Calder’s fleet was slightly smaller but better equipped. Calder was in the Prince of Wales. At precisely noon, the Prince of Wales signalled to form up into battle stations. The fleet then came into two lines and shortly after that, into a single line of battle. That manoeuvre alone took more than an hour which, given the poor conditions, was a very respectable time. Villeneuve ordered his combined fleet into one long line of battle, with not Villeneuve, but Admiral Don Federico Gravina’s Argonauta closest to the enemy.
Some time after three that afternoon, we would have seen two lines of ships facing each other about seven miles apart. If you stand on a beach on a hazy but not foggy day, you probably will not see much further than this. The English fleet was on a starboard tack. This meant that the wind was coming from the right-hand side. Therefore, Villeneuve’s fleet, ostensibly going the other way, would have had the wind on the port side, the left side. This is important when realizing how difficult it is to manoeuvre to engage the enemy. This is not team formation sailing. With the rigs of these huge ships, it could take hours not minutes to simply turn left, sail on for a little and then turn right to resume the line in order to get close enough to engage. In what might have been variable wind conditions with mist coming and going, commanders and sailing masters threw all their expertise into carrying out the famous naval order to engage the enemy more closely.
When Villeneuve altered course, presumably to stop Calder attacking him at the rear, Calder had to also alter course to keep parallel to the Frenchman’s fleet. The concept at that time was that a broadside of gun bombardment was the only effective way of dealing with a fleet engagement. Getting as close as possible made the likelihood of that broadside being more effective. Also, we have to remember that these ships were not dead in the water. They were still sailing. The light winds meant the whole positioning exercise was taken slowly. The mist, which came and went and varied between haze and fog, added to the puzzle of how to engage the enemy or to avoid it.
It was not until 5.15 that afternoon that the first shots were fired in the Battle of Cape Finisterre. The order to fire came from Gravina and it was his flagship, the Argonauta, which blasted away with her eighty guns at the British fleet. It took half an hour after Argonauta had fired on the Royal Navy’s Hero before the British ship could manoeuvre into a position to return the fire. Also, because of the weather conditions, especially the mist, it was necessary to lose ships out of the order of battle so they could get close enough to the commander-in-chief to tell him what was happening. We can begin to see the complexities of this naval warfare, even before the disaster and panic that followed spars and rigs being shot away and men blown to pieces. By the time darkness came and the mist had settled heavily, neither commander could possibly have known the whereabouts exactly of the other ships, nor of some of their own vessels.
Calder was facing four fogs. The first was the natural mist of temperature and sea. The second was the fog of all warfare, the uncertainty of what exactly was going on. The third was created by the two fleets. Imagine the effects of dozen upon dozen of cannonballs being fired. Constant firing produced masses of gun smoke. Disabled, even dismasted vessels produced a fourth fog, that of inboard chaos. If we take one example of that chaos, the big ninety-eight-gun Windsor Castle, we can see the confusion. The weather, the inability to manoeuvre at will and the fact of being in a position so easily seen, when others were obscured, meant that all enemy gunfire was trained on her. A ship in that state could not continue under its own efforts. Therefore, it had to be taken in tow. However, the Windsor Castle was a large vessel. Consequently, Calder could not delegate one of his smaller ships to do the job. Thus, the dismasting and casualties suffered by the Windsor Castle meant that another large vessel, desperately needed in the line of battle, was taken out of the offensive to look after her. The combined fleet suffered similar damage and at least one of the Spanish ships simply drifted into enemy lines.
There was quite a lot of firing and killing. The British at first seemed to have come off worst. The first estimates suggested Calder had lost about eighty men. A later count suggested about forty had been killed and somewhere in the region of 168 wounded. By the Atlantic grey dawn, the French and Spanish fleet appeared to have lost 149 men and almost twice that number wounded. Interestingly, most of the casualties were Spanish. Villeneuve’s flagship, the Bucentaure, had little damage and just a handful of casualties. It is not a difficult assessment that it was Gravina and not Villeneuve who had done most of the fighting. They had also lost two Spanish ships and, of course, the 1,200 men who were on board. The ships were not much good and so no great prize for the British. Moreover, the capture of more than a thousand Spanish presented a logistical headache. What was Calder expected to do with them? Also, taking two enemy vessels in tow was not an easy task. It would slow down Calder’s fleet and limit its ability to manoeuvre. But those ships were worth money. Calder clung to them and in doing so lost advantage and, eventually, his honour and his command.
With hindsight, Villeneuve had all the advantages on his side and should have at least attacked the rear of Calder’s joint squadron and rescued the Spanish ships. Given the high casualties in the British fleet, Villeneuve could easily have tested Calder’s will. Calder himself had taken a beating. Nevertheless, as Villeneuve did not immediately attack, Calder should have judged the Frenchman’s indecisiveness and nervousness. Equally, we may make a judgement about Villeneuve, but Calder would not have had our insight to his character. Moreover, there was certainly nothing wrong with the seamanship and tactical judgement of Gravina. On balance, Calder should have attacked as quickly as possi
ble and Villeneuve should have taken the same decision. For once in his life, Villeneuve had naval superiority if not supremacy. Neither admiral was a Cornwallis, a Nelson, a Ganteaume, a Missiessy, a Cochrane or a Collingwood.
Villeneuve did not decide until after lunch the following day to go after Calder, who was quite clearly by that time in no fighting mood. Having made the decision, because of the poor winds it took Villeneuve another two hours to get his combined fleet into a battle formation. Wind and sea state were certainly not going to change just because Villeneuve had finally made a bold decision. Calder, in the meantime, was by now far away on the horizon and occasionally disappearing in the mist or haze. He wanted to escape rather than put Villeneuve to the sword. It was a decision which changed naval history.
At first glance, we had here a naval farce: a weak French admiral apparently deciding to go in pursuit of a British fleet commanded by an admiral more interested in protecting his dubious prizes and having had a bloodied nose from the combined fleet.
Calder, it still appears, was guilty of lack of purpose. The Franco– Spanish combined fleet was known by the British to be the biggest at sea. He had been given instructions by the Admiralty to engage Villeneuve. These orders were not transmitted in order for there to be a high seas skirmish. Calder’s task was to send Villeneuve, Gravina and as many of their ships and men as possible either to the bottom of the Atlantic or in tow as prisoners and prizes. In admittedly difficult circumstances, Calder ran away from his implicit instructions. There can be no doubting that he knew the importance of this engagement. He was a vain man. Therefore, he knew that success here would have given him everything that he could have wanted for the rest of his career. It would even have put him above Nelson – one of his supreme ambitions. Yet he still failed to track after Villeneuve, to wait for the right conditions to attack and then attempt to deliver the blow that would have finished the war at sea with France.
Nelson reached the eastern Atlantic, discovered Villeneuve was to the north and so, on 23 July, he sailed for England. On the same day Napoleon arrived at Boulogne. By the middle of August Nelson was in Portsmouth. Villeneuve was trying to meet up with Admiral Honoré Ganteaume and break into the Channel, but the latter was boxed in by Britain’s southern squadron and so Villeneuve turned back, heading for Cadiz.
On 15 September, Nelson sailed south from Portsmouth in his flagship, the Victory. At dawn on 21 October, Nelson stood on his quarterdeck and watched as the Spanish advance squadron of twelve ships under Admiral Gravina and twenty-one French ships under Villeneuve hove into sight. The war had started two years earlier, but this was the first time that Nelson had seen the enemy. It was to be the only time. The combined Franco–Spanish fleet was decimated and Villeneuve was captured along with his flagship, the Bucentaure, but Nelson was fatally wounded.
Nelson had confirmed what Napoleon now had to accept. Britain really did rule the sea-lanes. But the war did not stop at Trafalgar.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
1805–8
Napoleon had planned to invade Southern England with his Grande Armée of some 177,000 troops. In August 1805, Napoleon arrived at Boulogne to review his army and the strategic situation. The question was simple: invade or not invade? Firstly, neither of his two major fleets was in support. One was bottled up in Brest. The other was still in the western Atlantic. Secondly, and most decisively, the news from the East and the grand coalition of European States forming against him meant his armies needed his attention. That August, Napoleon’s umpteenth grand plan for invasion – there had certainly been fourteen – was abandoned. This was a full three months before Trafalgar, a battle that would have meant he had no reinforcement fleet, nor one that could continue to protect the continual supply line and, if necessary, cover a retreat – although the Emperor never imagined that for long. This was the end of his invasion plan, it was not the end of the war. That would rumble for a further full decade until Waterloo in 1815 when Wellington nailed him to his mast of battle honours. For the moment, with Trafalgar two months off, Napoleon marched his divisions to the Danube.
In the year of Trafalgar, a coalition, the so-called Third Coalition, had been formed between Sweden and the Russian, Austrian and British empires. Their aim was to put down the French Empire led by Napoleon who just the previous December had been crowned Emperor. Here we have a simple reminder that war at the start of the nineteenth century was different than at the beginning of the twenty-first century, with all the amazing communications of the latter era. To control such a coalition of forces was an almost impossible task. To know what other armies were doing and the circumstances that might change those plans was a difficult strategic as well as tactical task for any commander, especially when there was unlikely to be one overall commander, general staff and political agreement on how a war would be prosecuted and where that might be done. So there should be little surprise that the single command of Napoleon, by now joined by the Bavarians, should have had certain military advantage.
The Austrians under General Karl Mack von Leiberich (1752–1828) took pre-emptive action. Mack ordered his 77,000 troops to protect the Alpine passes – probably because he thought Napoleon’s thrust would enter northern Italy. His support for this badly judged action was the Russian army that was still in Poland but Napoleon saw the opportunity to literally outflank Mack’s army by cutting it off from the Russians. Mack came face to face with the French VI Corps at Elchingen on 14 October (still, incidentally, a whole week before Trafalgar). He lost 2,000 troops and two days later surrendered. This, the Ulm campaign of Napoleon, was a turning point in his war. But Napoleon’s supreme moment of tactical genius was to take place two months later. On 2 December, with Nelson not yet buried and so the British popular mood distracted from the great military campaign unfolding in Continental Europe, Napoleon defeated the combined Austro–Russian armies commanded by Tsar Alexander I near Austerlitz in the modern-day Czech Republic. This was the end of the coalition of Sweden, Britain, Austria and Russia. It also meant the end of the Holy Roman Empire. This would not satisfy the ambitions of any of the European States, nor their fears – especially Prussian anxieties that managed another alliance, the Fourth Coalition and set off for war against France the following year, 1806.
As for Pitt, he had little time left and would die in February of that year, supposedly uttering at his end, ‘Oh, my country! How I leave my country!’ Before death, his deep sorrow was for his close friend Henry Dundas, the first Viscount Melville (1742–1811). Melville was to be impeached for maladministration in the Admiralty where he had been First Lord between 1804 and 1805. It was said he misappropriated funds. He did not, but the accusation finished him.
There was far more to this than a minister’s maladministration. And the Melville case gives a good insight into the political animosities of the time. Pitt had to submit to the King’s right to appoint ministers, and Addington had been returned to government, this time as Lord President. It was claimed by Addington and his colleagues that Melville was guilty of malversation, that’s to say corrupt practice or behaviour in public office. Melville most probably was guilty of negligence – but nothing much more. This difficulty might have been overcome if it hadn’t been for the third grouping in politics: the Foxites, the people Pitt had wanted in government; the people the King had turned away. If Charles James Fox and his followers could fuel the charges against Melville, then the fight between Addington and Pitt would be noisier, and the Foxites could claim that they displayed the unity the country so much needed. The charge was made and Melville was impeached. Pitt wept openly; some said that he was overcome for his old friend, particularly as their other friend, William Wilberforce, spoke against him. But also Pitt was, by then, terribly ill. He was dying of cancer and his stamina, his resourcefulness and his emotions were all stretched to breaking point. Fox, Pitt’s great political rival, observed that death ‘was a poor way of getting rid of one’s enemy’. And although he voted against a Commons motio
n for a Pitt memorial in Westminster Abbey, Fox readily agreed that Pitt’s debts should be met by the Exchequer. Fox, just eleven years older than Pitt, would not survive him by many months.
In addition to seeing the death of two English statesmen, 1806 was another year spent at war. It saw the British taking the Cape of Good Hope, but for those in other circumstances perhaps none of this meant much, especially in the more wretched reaches of British life. Hard by Westminster, in the Parish of St James’s, a perfect illustration of these extremes could be found in an official Government document.
General State of Poor Children under the care and management of the Governors And Directors of the Poor of the Parish of St James’s, Westminster.
Number of children transferred from preceding years:
650
Born and received this year:
565
Of whom have died in the workhouse:
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