Britain Against Napoleon

by Roger Knight

  The Atkinson case fuelled public distrust of those who had made money from the American Revolutionary War. After the findings of the Committee on Public Accounts, which produced its reports between 1780 and 1787, transparency in government dealings was much debated, and Edmund Burke and others pressed for reform at every opportunity. One cause for public suspicion was that the Treasury had not openly tendered for contracts to supply the army, although it had done a reasonable job in administering them.62 Another was the feeling that political influence was instrumental in gaining a contract. As a result, parliament passed Crewe’s Act and Clerke’s Act in 1782, which prohibited holders of government contracts from entering parliament. In general, these steps did help to restore confidence, although compromises were inevitably made. The Navy Board, for instance, allowed four MPs to transfer their contracts to silent partners. But the owners of the great Crawley ironworks near Newcastle surrendered their government contracts so that one of their partners did not have to give up his seat.63 By the 1790s, these safeguards had slipped, as most obviously demonstrated by the powerful and immensely rich contractor and MP Thomas Williams.

  The last of the major departments with war responsibilities was the Ordnance Department. Both the navy and the Ordnance managed very large industrial concerns, staffed by thousands of employees, some of which were on distant stations; but their governing structures were quite different. The Board of Ordnance was a senior board, and most of its members were MPs, likening it to the Board of Admiralty; while the Navy Board, responsible for the dockyards and shipbuilding, was more junior, with only the senior member of the Board, the comptroller of the navy, representing the Board in parliament.* At the head of the Ordnance Department was the master-general, a member of the cabinet until June 1798.64 The post did not have the seniority of the first lord of the Admiralty, who belonged to the inner group of cabinet ministers responsible for strategy and policy, and the master-general of the Ordnance was outside this inner circle. Thus the artillery and engineers under his command were sent to support army operations for which he was not politically responsible. A further complication for the navy was that the first lord wielded extensive naval patronage, appointing admirals to stations and captains to ships, some of whom were likely to attain great wealth through prize money. While the navy attracted political trouble, the Ordnance Department was remarkably free of it.

  The master-general was always a senior serving army officer, and the Board of Ordnance, which reported to him, had to be able to run the rest of the department without him, for he might well be appointed to active service, as happened in the case of Cornwallis and Chatham. Indeed, there was a marked distance between the master-general and the Board. The Board ran the considerable business of manufacturing armaments for both the army and the navy, as well as overseeing the building of barracks and fortifications, work mostly done by contractors. Communication with the army was handled through the master-general, while the Board of Ordnance dealt directly with the navy. The Ordnance had its own devolved style, with a good deal of local autonomy, and less of its business was referred to London than in the case of the navy.65

  The Board of Ordnance oversaw the manufacture of munitions of all kinds, including cannon, shot and gunpowder for both the army and the navy.* It employed good-sized industrial workforces in the gunpowder mills at Waltham Abbey and Faversham, at the gun wharves at all the home bases and in the powder hoys that delivered gunpowder to warships. Magazines stored gunpowder at Purfleet on the Thames, at Priddy’s Hard on the Gosport side of Portsmouth Harbour and at Upnor Castle on the Medway, establishments that multiplied through the wars, with the number of old ships adapted as floating depots particularly increasing during the Napoleonic War.66 At the Woolwich Warren, artificers and labourers manufactured brass ordnance, shot and small-arms ammunition, proofed the cannon received from contractors and loaded the ordnance transports. To their number should be added artillery personnel as well as convicts, who were housed in hulks moored in the Thames.67 By 1805 the establishment was sufficiently significant to be called the Royal Arsenal, a change initiated by the king himself.†

  The master-general commanded the country’s fortifications and barrack building, together with the increasingly important mapping capacity of the Ordnance Survey. In 1784 the hard-working duke of Richmond was appointed to be master-general. Richmond’s abrasive personality and unpopularity ensured not only that the separateness of his department was accentuated but also that his personal isolation grew.* His blatant appointments to Ordnance posts of family members and his neighbours who lived near his country seat at Goodwood in West Sussex offended public opinion, at a time when patronage and sinecures were beginning to be questioned. Lord Grenville observed that Richmond was ‘ingenious and acute … and in diligence and perseverance rarely equalled’ but ‘In office, he laboured too much at detached objects and minute details, harassing to his inferiors and perplexing to himself.’68 Richmond himself remarked ruefully to Edmund Burke: ‘I pass in the world for very obstinate, wrong-headed and tenacious of my opinions.’ He was indeed hot-tempered, inconsistent and quarrelsome: he fell out both with the duke of York and with Henry Dundas, and when in 1795 Pitt eventually ejected him from his post no one in government was sorry to see him go.69

  Nevertheless, Richmond was a reforming master-general. From the time of his appointment to the department in 1784 he started to reorganize it, cutting staff and budgets.70 Richmond first achieved a considerable improvement in fortifications. An immediate post-war priority was the defence of Plymouth, from which the civilian population had fled in panic at the approach of the combined French and Spanish fleets in the summer of 1779. Some improvements had been made during the American Revolutionary War, but in 1784 plans were made to fortify the dockyard ‘against a regular siege’.71 Accommodation was built in Fort Monkton at the entrance to Portsmouth Harbour. At the other end of the country a completely new fort was built at Fort Charlotte in the Shetland Islands, in response to the harassment of the north-west coast of Britain by American privateers during the war.72

  However, Richmond’s effort to build comprehensive land defences against French attack did not succeed, though he worked very hard to plan an effective scheme of fortifications along the southern coast of England, which he put forward in parliamentary bills in 1785 and 1786. His obstinacy and his very obvious moves to muzzle opposition meant that the bills were given a rough ride and were rejected by parliament when they came to be debated. Instead, a board of fifteen army officers and ten naval officers was appointed, with Richmond as chairman, to examine every conceivable French invasion plan and the most effective fortifications for a counter-attack. Its report, which was considered by the cabinet in January 1786, was also systematically rounded upon when it came to parliament, mainly on the grounds that the master-general had packed the parliamentary committee with supporters, and that there had been what was seen as sharp practice with the evidence: Sheridan called the report ‘a fortress of sophistry’.73 It too was rejected, though only by the casting vote of the speaker. A slightly revised bill, which was put before parliament in May 1786, was also voted down.74

  Attempts to improve fortifications were not confined to the British Isles: in the immediate pre-war years, an expensive scheme was completed in the West Indies. At the end of the American Revolutionary War the defences of English Harbour in Antigua were surveyed by two Royal Engineer officers, and plans for fortifications and barracks were submitted. General Thomas Shirley, the governor of the island, lobbied hard: he had been governor of Dominica when it had been overrun by the French, and he did not want to be caught again.75 Although the Island Assembly contributed almost nothing to the cost, Shirley got his way, and the Ordnance Department paid. Fortifications and barracks were built at the cost of well over £100,000 by 1790. When the plan was completed just after 1793, fifty buildings had been raised around English Harbour. But no French threat to the West Indies subsequently materialized, and the artillery th
ere never fired a gun in anger.

  The production of gunpowder was also improved. In 1784 Pitt had wanted to sell the Faversham Powder Mills, being convinced that commercial powder merchants could make better and cheaper gunpowder. Richmond, at that point powerful in the cabinet, persuaded him otherwise, encouraged by Major William Congreve, then deputy comptroller of the Royal Laboratory at Woolwich, who argued that powder could be manufactured more cheaply and securely by the state. The mixing of the three ingredients of gunpowder was tricky and, of course, potentially dangerous. British strength at sea ensured a steady supply of good-quality sulphur from Sicily and saltpetre from India, which the French lacked. The third constituent of gunpowder was charcoal, which was to be burnt in quantity from domestic wood. Congreve was constantly experimenting at Woolwich with the proportions of the mixture, as well as milling and grinding methods, and keeping the powder dry. As a result, the strength of British gunpowder was to be greater than that of France or of Holland in the coming wars, as proven by comparative tests made by the depot at Purfleet in 1794 and 1795.76

  Magazines and other buildings for examining the powder were completed in the early 1770s at Priddy’s Hard, the ordnance yard on the far side of Portsmouth Harbour from the dockyard, and Richmond and Congreve increased storage capacity there and at Plymouth. In 1789 the Ordnance acquired a site at Tipner Point, on the east side of Portsmouth Harbour, and slowly built a further magazine housing 5,000 barrels, although it was not to be finished during Richmond’s time as master-general.77* In the final development, again in 1789, the year in which Congreve was appointed comptroller at Woolwich, the private gunpowder-mills at Waltham Abbey were acquired.78

  The most serious problem that Richmond tackled was the quality of the cannon supplied to the army and navy. The numbers that had burst in the American Revolutionary War was little short of scandalous, but not surprising since many of them were old, and most had been ‘hollow cast’ using the old three-piece moulding technique. Only in 1775 did the Board of Ordnance decide to purchase guns that were ‘bored from solid’ (i.e., the barrel was drilled out from a solid gun), thus disqualifying almost all the Sussex furnaces, a decision that marked the beginning of the end for Wealden gunfounding.79 All iron cannon were now cast solid by contractors and the barrel then bored. The cannon contractors were mainly from the north of England, although one of the most important, the Carron Company, was based in Scotland.*

  Until 1780 there was no satisfactory process of quality control when guns were accepted by government. In that year Captain Thomas Blomefield, an experienced artillery officer, was appointed inspector of artillery and superintendent of the Brass Foundry at Woolwich, with complete responsibility for ‘proofing’ guns before they were accepted and paid for by the Ordnance Department (proofing was the process of testing the gun by firing it with a set amount of powder). His most important reform was to introduce the ‘thirty-round proof’, in spite of resistance from the gunfounding contractors, who naturally wanted fewer rounds fired from their newly cast cannon. By applying high inspection and proofing standards, Blomefield ensured that all substandard or damaged guns were rejected. In addition, large numbers were repaired through a new French method called ‘bouching’, by which any worn and oversized vent was filled with a copper bolt, and a new vent bored through the bolt.80 Given the difficulty in the late eighteenth century of casting iron to a consistent standard, his achievement in increasing quality is particularly impressive. He wrote to the Board in 1792:

  The Imperfections of Cast Iron as applied to Guns are the extremes of hardness and softness, the former quality producing brittleness and the later a want of tenacity and cohesion; great skill and unremitting attention is requisite in the process of smelting it from the Mineral … it can never be expected that Iron Guns can be uniformly cast of a requisite degree of perfection which renders it indispensable that this variable should be guarded against by constructing them of heavy dimensions … it would therefore, I conceive, be inadvisable to diminish the established Proof Charges …81

  Through these means the standards of guns in the navy, coastal defence and the army were much improved, and the incidence of gun bursts in the wars to follow greatly reduced.*

  It was also a period of great experiment with gunnery. Blomefield, given a free hand by the Board of Ordnance and encouraged by Richmond, designed a strengthened, standard gun (which eventually came to bear his name) while working with the contractor Samuel Walker of Rotherham, who from 1786 produced experimental guns for him. Of some nine cannon-founding contractors, Walker and the Carron Company of Scotland produced the most new guns, undertaking contracts in thousands of tons.82 The French were particularly interested in coke-smelted cannon, and in 1784 managed to get Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond, an expert on furnaces, into the Carron works, but precautions had been taken and he could not see everything, especially ‘the place where the cannon are bored, which nobody was allowed to see’, and his report relied on his memory, ‘for it may be presumed that I was not at liberty to take notes of them in writing’.83 And, away from the limelight, in 1787, an artillery lieutenant, Henry Shrapnel, gave the first demonstration of his spherical case shell, filled with shot, in front of the officer commanding Gibraltar. This anti-personnel weapon was adopted by the army in 1803.84

  Richmond pushed through important innovations for the army and navy’s small arms, too, using his main Birmingham contractors, Henry Nock and Jonathan Hennem. The master-general considered the standard ‘Land Musket’ to be outdated. A variety of European ideas were combined into ‘The Duke of Richmond’s Pattern’, which was officially adopted as the new infantry weapon. Testing these innovations took time, and Richmond signed his biggest contract, for 10,000 of the new muskets, in December 1792, only just before the declaration of war. Had there been more opportunity to train the gunsmiths in the manufacture of the weapon, Britain would have begun the war with the most modern and efficient small arms in Europe. In the event, the Ordnance Department had to fall back on the old ‘Land Pattern’, and the East India Company came to the rescue with its shorter, lighter ‘India Pattern’ musket, which was to serve as the standard British line infantry weapon until 1840.

  Richmond did, however, succeed in regularizing the gun-cleaning tools for the private soldier. Each man received a worm, turnscrew, pricker and bush, and an annual allowance for emery, brick dust and oil. He also introduced a new steel ramrod for sea service muskets. Some of these innovations were long lasting, with a new type of screwless lock, developed by Henry Nock, remaining in use until the 1830s. In 1790 Richmond found a more advantageous contract for gun flints and switched to Brandon in Suffolk, where they are still made today.85

  Richmond’s ideas were not confined to manufacturing improvements. The origins of the modern Ordnance Survey can be traced to his time as master-general. He encouraged the scientific work of the ‘Principal Triangulation of Great Britain’, which had started under the direction of General Sir William Roy in 1783. Surveying instruments were refined and improved, chiefly through the instrument-maker Jesse Ramsden. There was always tension between the more purely scientific aspects of the trigonometrical national survey and the necessities of defence against invasion, which laid more stress on topography, but towards the end of the 1780s defence gained the upper hand and more resources were made available to it.86 Between 1787 and 1791 Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Wight were surveyed and six-inch-to-the-mile maps were drawn; but when war was declared, the northward progress of the triangulation survey was halted and the emphasis shifted to the topographical surveys of the southern counties, vulnerable to invasion. Richmond expanded the number of skilled civilian surveyors and draughtsmen: by 1794 thirty-one were based in the Drawing Room in the Tower of London.87* This development was, however, the last of a considerable list of initiatives brought about by one of the most progressive, but also one of the most unpopular and now largely forgotten, masters-general of the Ordnance.

  The much reduce
d peacetime army was governed very differently from the navy and the Ordnance, each of which had to manage large industrial operations throughout both war and peace. Until the outbreak of hostilities, neither a secretary of state for war, at cabinet rank, nor a commander-in-chief was appointed. The memory of power based on military force during the Commonwealth made any permanent concentration of troops anathema to all shades of political opinion throughout the eighteenth century, and the rejection of a standing army of any size was a long-established tradition. During the peace, therefore, the army was managed by a minister below cabinet rank: the secretary at war, who presided over the War Office in the Horse Guards and who presented the annual Army Estimates to parliament and authorized all expenditure of money.* During the 1780s this post was occupied by Sir George Yonge, an ex-diplomat whose extravagant tastes beggared him and whose erratic performance later in his career made him a laughing stock. The king, who worked closely with the secretary at war, especially on promotions, later said that Yonge ‘was never a man of business’.88 But he performed routine peacetime business well enough, managing finance and liaising with the king over promotions. In the Horse Guards, Lieutenant-General Sir William Fawcett, adjutant-general from 1781 to 1799, was responsible for discipline, training, military regulations and applications for leave of absence. Arrangements for the movement and quartering of troops in Britain were undertaken by the Quartermaster-General’s Department, although the orders were issued by the secretary at war, as responsibility for general civil order was held in non-military hands.89