Britain Against Napoleon

by Roger Knight

  When Pitt took office in 1783 the army was in a poor state. Battalions, reduced to minimum size, had been sent off to Ireland for reasons of economy, and the military presence in the Mediterranean and Caribbean was negligible. In any case, the peacetime army was always thinly spread and dispersed in small groups in order to carry out its anti-smuggling role along the south coast, to the detriment of its training as a body. Until the establishment of a civilian police force in the 1840s, the army was as much the guarantor of civil order as it was an instrument of foreign policy.90 In this respect, the first part of the decade following 1783 was reasonably peaceful, although the memory of London burning during the Gordon Riots of 1780 was still fresh.* Towards the end of the 1780s a new pattern of domestic disorder was emerging, in part prompted by rapid industrialization. The army was still required to attend to anti-smuggling duties: between 1786 and 1789, for example, the 38th Foot Regiment spent a quarter of its time chasing smugglers, while the 10th Light Dragons nearly 40 per cent.91 But troops were needed at Nottingham and Leicester in 1787; two years later they were also called to Liverpool and Wrexham to quell industrial disturbances. In August 1789 a detachment of the 1st Dragoons was sent to Leeds, where the workers had destroyed some new wool-spinning machines.92 In 1791 riots took place in Birmingham.

  By the second half of the decade the army was becoming an effective peacetime organization.93 The garrison at Gibraltar was augmented by early 1785, but it took the threat of war in the Dutch Crisis of 1787 for the government to increase those in the Caribbean and East Indies. Other significant reforms were made. Infantry battalions of eight companies were given an additional two companies, making them more tactically viable. Six new infantry battalions were raised specifically for service abroad.94 Recruiting improved, and the army became numerically stronger, reaching over 41,000 effective troops by 1790.*

  In this year progress was brought to a halt by the Nootka Sound Crisis. As a war had not been declared, the army conspicuously lacked a commander-in-chief, and the secretary at war was now desperately overworked and not senior enough to put expeditions in hand without delays.† Eight battalions went to the fleet for trans-shipment to the West Indies, a move designed to defend British possessions against potential Spanish attack, which left the number of troops in Britain at a dangerously low level for national defence as well as for maintaining domestic order. In addition, not enough marines had been raised to man the mobilized warships and the War Office was repeatedly requested to supply soldiers for the task, which was to lead to a souring of relations between the War Office and the Admiralty. By November 1790, 2,436 troops were spread aboard thirty-three warships.95

  Measures were taken to recruit quickly. Ireland’s less developed economy made for easier recruitment and became an important source of army manpower. The government also did not hesitate to create ‘Independent Companies of Foot’, approved by the secretary at war and raised quickly by professional army officers, who saw the measure as a means to social and professional promotion. This decentralized system of recruitment was to become very successful.96 ‘Invalid companies’ were taken up from Chelsea Hospital for guarding duties. However, in spite of these measures, the widespread dispersal of battalions in 1790, and the many months involved in returning them to Britain, meant that regular army units were not in place when the war started in earnest in early 1793. During that year the immediate requirement for tens of thousands of recruits, and their training, together with immediate operations in Europe, was to lead to a long period of failure by the army.

  With Paris descending into anarchy and the troops of Austria and Prussia preparing to invade France, the government feared that the influence of the radical ideas that were changing so much in France would spread to England. The difficulty was that purpose-built accommodation for troops hardly existed.97 The only sizeable working barracks were the Royal Marine Barracks at Chatham, Portsmouth and Plymouth, which had been built in the American Revolutionary War to house the forces protecting the dockyards in case of invasion. The great barracks at Woolwich had been started in 1777, but were not finished until 1808.98 In general, if troops moved about the country they stopped in towns and quartered in private homes. Widely dispersed castles, forts and dockyard barracks, highly unsuited for the concentrations of troops that were required, could house only 40,000.99

  Henry Dundas, as the home secretary, rapidly brought together a plan for housing troops and secured the king’s approval for the building of barracks at Hyde Park and Knightsbridge. At a meeting at his home in Wimbledon with Pitt and Sir George Yonge, he despatched Colonel Oliver De Lancey, who had put down the Birmingham riots in 1791, around the country to investigate the barracks in England. De Lancey reported back in June 1792:

  it is a dangerous measure to keep troops in the manufacturing towns in their present dispersed state, and unless barracks could be established for the men where they could be kept under the eyes of their officers, it would be prudent to quarter them in the towns and villages in the country, whence in case of emergency they would act with much more effect.100

  Dundas moved quickly. He by-passed the Ordnance Department, usually responsible for the construction of barracks but with a reputation for delay when it came to building, and also avoided dealing with the duke of Richmond, with whom relations were bad. He authorized De Lancey, appointed to the new post of superintendent of barracks, to engage private contractors to build barracks for three troops of infantry and horse in Sheffield, Nottingham and Birmingham, and for six troops in Manchester. Before the end of the year, Coventry and Norwich were added to the list, and a seventh barracks was ordered at Hounslow.101 It was a hasty but necessary decision, in anticipation of civil unrest rather than of direct danger from an enemy.* Significant civil disturbances would occur during the war years, although they were primarily caused by food shortages, not French republican ideas.

  The rapid improvements in public and private communication at home and abroad, brought about by Pitt’s administration for reasons of economic efficiency, were to be critical for the war effort in the years ahead. Fortunately, the Post Office was another government institution that was radically reformed in the 1780s. Driven by the Treasury to cut costs, the postmaster-general in 1787, Lord Walsingham, privatized the packet service. He addressed the Lisbon and trans-Atlantic routes first, issuing plans and specifications for smaller packet ships to potential contractors. A particular feature of the new design was the simplified plan below decks for reducing the number of places where the crew could hide goods for illicit trading, which cut into customs revenue. Instead of state-owned vessels of 200 tons, manned by 30 men, those to America would now be 150 tons, and to Lisbon only 100 tons. North Sea packets were to be of 70 tons, crewed by 11 men, though this was increased in wartime to 17. Contracts awarded to the masters and owners were for seven, fourteen or twenty-one years, with six months’ notice from either side, for a set rate of £1,350 a year. In spite of opposition from the packet captains, the measures went ahead. The home waters’ routes to the Continent, with vessels from 70 to 100 tons, were also changed, and all packets became privately owned, contracted to the government.102

  The land postal service was slow and inefficient and its income was not keeping pace with the growing volume of post. The prime minister’s intervention in the affairs of the Post Office in 1784 caused a political storm. Pitt wanted to improve efficiency and increase revenue, and gave much support to John Palmer, whose idea was to replace the mounted post boys with high-speed, French-built coaches also designed to take passengers. Postal rates would be raised to pay for the improved services. But Pitt found that changing the ways of this 270-year-old government institution was more difficult than he had anticipated. On 21 June he summoned the Post Office officials to the Treasury and announced that the first mail coach would run from Bristol to London on 1 August.103 Palmer was to be employed by the Post Office in a senior position and receive 2½ per cent on the surplus from his scheme. The surprised P
ost Office officials were less than enamoured by these ideas, and the meeting turned angry, causing Pitt to leave abruptly. The long-established secretary, Anthony Todd, spent the next five years trying to obstruct the scheme. Relations between the officials and the undiplomatic Palmer deteriorated, and Pitt became heartily sick of the business.

  The introduction of Palmer’s mail coaches in 1784 brought about a reliable and frequent post that exceeded the expectations of the populace. Before 1784 the post travelled between five and six miles an hour; by 1792 seven miles an hour was achieved.104 By the end of the century mail delivery speeds had increased to between eight and nine miles an hour. All major postal routes had a daily delivery: Bath, for instance, would have the London evening papers the morning after they were printed.105 The new Bristol coach completed its journey in sixteen hours, and within a year the coaches were introduced into East Anglia and the south-east. By 1786 they serviced the Great North Road.106 With all other traffic giving way to them, and no turnpike charges, they were faster than any other means of transport and reached new standards of reliability and timeliness. By 1792 sixteen mail coaches were arriving and leaving London every day.107 The net annual postal revenue rose from £196,000 in 1784 to £391,000 in 1793; and by the early years of the nineteenth century it was over a million pounds a year.108

  For those who had been responsible for the main improvements in the machinery of war, the period of peace ended in personal disappointments. The unpopular Lord Howe was the first to resign. Facing the same problem as other first lords before him – that is, far more applicants for commands and lieutenants’ posts than he had available – he froze all promotions in 1787. He was attacked in the press and in parliament, but lacked the fluency and the will to make a reasonable public case. In the House ‘he assured their Lordships that patronage was not so desirable as might be imagined, and that he was sure, out of twenty candidates for an appointment, to disappoint nineteen, and by no means certain of pleasing the twentieth.’109 Deeply unpopular, he resigned as first lord in 1788 over Middleton’s trivial, but to him symbolic, promotion from captain to rear-admiral. Howe had precedent on his side when he argued that a rear-admiral should be serving at sea or at least available for service, but Pitt did not support him. In his stead, Pitt appointed his elder brother, John, earl of Chatham; although Chatham’s loyalty could be relied upon, his lack of energy was to be a great disadvantage.

  After eight years of bureaucratic infighting in the Post Office, John Palmer was forced to resign in 1792, although Pitt settled a handsome pension on him.110 Richmond remained as master-general until 1795, but was politically sidelined and held no further public office. Middleton did not survive much longer than Howe. Frustrated by Pitt’s reluctance to act upon the naval reforms that had been outlined by the Commission on Fees, he resigned suddenly, to the relief of his colleagues in the Navy Office. George Marsh heard the news as he arrived at Somerset House on the morning of 15 March 1790. He noted in his diary:

  Most of the clerks were in the Hall of the Navy Office to meet and tell me of it, as I went to it, expressing the utmost pleasure on the event … In general Captains in the Navy are the most unfit persons to be members of the Navy Board, as they know nothing of the civil department and are, too, from their education and habits, very absolute and consequential.111

  ‘Absolute and consequential’ they may have been, yet Middleton and Richmond (and Palmer, too) possessed just those qualities that peacetime administration needed. Driven, controlling and self-absorbed, and caring nothing for personal popularity, they forced through change not because it was politically advantageous to do so, but because they believed it was right and that it was needed. With the very substantial budgets provided by Pitt they were able to achieve a great deal. Through them and their deputies, fundamental improvements were made to the country’s capacity to wage war, which was be called upon regularly in the next twenty-two years. At the same time government departments developed greater expertise in the letting and management of contracts; the relationship between the public and private sectors would provide the key to future British military and naval expansion.

  The differences in 1793 between British and French political stability, economic growth and naval capability had never been greater. In the French naval bases, ships were in poor condition and the few seamen that could be mustered were in a state of insubordination. The mutinies of 1790 had resulted in the dissolution of the corps of French naval officers, while the risky and costly investment in the breakwaters at Cherbourg had come to nothing.112 Britain may have lost the American Revolutionary War, but it won the peace that followed.

  Part Two

  HOLDING THE LINE

  3

  The First Crisis 1795–1798

  Thus is the present War a new phenomenon, for, besides being a necessary War for self-defence, it is A WAR OF PRINCIPLE – a War in defence of all the Rights of Nations, against the Arbitrary Usurpations of a Gallic Mob.

  – Robert Nares, Man’s Best Right: A Solemn Appeal in the Name of Religion (1793)1

  The exertion of France in her state of political insanity has as much exceeded the natural efforts of that country as the strength of the raving mad does that of a reasonable man.

  – General David Dundas, ‘Memorandum on Invasion’, November 17962

  For two years, from late 1792, when war between Britain and France looked increasingly likely, reasoned parliamentary debate on the nature of the revolution in France was absent. The nerves of overwrought MPs were frayed by news of French military success against Austria and Prussia, and by fear of French republican ideas and of domestic social change. The politicians postured to inflame public opinion. Pitt said of the French in January 1793 that ‘their ambition was unbounded, so the anarchy, which they hoped to establish, was universal’, and by June he had made it clear that he hoped for a change of government: ‘the best security we could obtain, would be in the end of that wild ungoverned system.’3 As many as 2,000 loyalist associations were founded up and down the country in 1792 and 1793.4 William Windham, a moderate Whig, though with a personality characterized by extremes, went so far as to assert that Britain had been infiltrated by French sympathizers: ‘In every town, in every village, nay almost in every house, these worthy gentlemen had their agents.’ When pressed to negotiate with the French, Pitt argued that to accredit the republic by sending an ambassador would be an affront to British dignity. Edmund Burke argued that the acceptance of French principles would endanger ‘our property, our wives, everything which was dear and sacred’. No stranger to histrionics, at one point he waved a dagger in the House, representing that it was one of 3,000 that had been ordered in Birmingham by the French.5

  The ideological nature of the war fought between Pitt’s government and the National Convention in Paris pushed both sides to perverse and exaggerated statements. Rumours of the killing of prisoners reached London, and in May 1794 the Convention passed a law declaring that prisoners of war were to be executed. According to Colonel Harry Calvert, in Holland with the British Army, the French decreed that ‘no English nor Hanoverian prisoners shall be made … not one of them ought to return to the traitorous territory of England … Let the British slaves perish, and Europe be free.’ The duke of York’s immediate reply to this manifesto was moderate and honourable: ‘mercy to the vanquished is the brightest gem in the soldier’s character.’ Ten days later Calvert reported that the Convention’s orders had been completely reversed, and that any French soldier guilty of inhumanity to the British would be guillotined.6 On 1 June, hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic, the British and French fleets met in battle. When the French ship Vengeur du Peuple sank, British seamen saved hundreds of the French crew: old traditions of humanity between enemies were not about to be swept aside.7

  Extremism in parliament was matched by violence on the streets. By the last months of 1794 the government had to deal with serious domestic unrest; the wrath of the crowd was directed against the twin
anxieties of impressment and the high price of food. Trouble had flared against crimping houses and recruiting offices.* On 13 July 1795, during one of Pitt’s dinners, rioters marched down Whitehall and gathered outside No. 10 Downing Street. One report mentioned that there were 12,000 people in the crowd. Stones were thrown through the windows, and one of Pitt’s guests, the earl of Mornington (the future Lord Wellesley and elder brother of the future duke of Wellington), was hit on the shoulder. The crowd, beaten off by the military, flowed over Westminster Bridge to St George’s Fields, to chants of ‘Pitt’s Head and a Quartern Loaf for Sixpence’. A suspected crimping house and a butcher’s shop were attacked and furniture was burnt in the street.8 Some of the rioters were trampled by the cavalry and two died.

  Nor was London the only place to be affected by domestic unrest. Resistance to impressment into the navy led to violence in all the major seaports of the country. In dockside pressing disturbances, casualties were more likely to be members of the press gang than the men they were pursuing, very often in pitched battles.* Detestation of naval service was particularly strong in the north-east of England, an area that had little loyalty to the navy, and attempts to impress seamen there were complicated by a serious labour dispute between merchant seamen and shipowners that had started in October 1792 over rising food prices. At the outbreak of war in February 1793 the keelmen on the Wear blocked the river by mooring a double line of keels from bank to bank, a strike that was violently broken by a force of dragoons from Newcastle. In North Shields the press gang, without much support from the magistrates, was embarrassingly run out of town; as the report to the Home Office related: the sailors ‘drove the Press Gang thro’ the streets today with their Jackets turn’d, and their Hatts under their arms’.9 It was little wonder that regulating officers and the lieutenants on impressment duty were faced with desertion from the press gang itself while on a raid, particularly if it was composed of naval seamen who had themselves been pressed.