Britain Against Napoleon

by Roger Knight

  Nevertheless, a serious Irish rebellion broke out on 24 May 1798. The army was reinforced, naval squadrons were stationed off the coast and experienced soldiers were now sent to Ireland. Lieutenant-General Gerard Lake, commander-in-chief, determined on ruthless suppression.* He was supported by Major General David Dundas, the experienced and thorough Major General John Moore, and the brilliant, headstrong Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Craufurd, who was deputy quartermaster-general. Craufurd felt that the Irish Militia was not ill-disciplined and that poor performance was the fault of the officers, ‘more concerned with heavy drinking and nursing their packs of beagles than with learning the arts of warfare and attending to the welfare of their men’.110 Craufurd’s great fear was that the Irish rebels, if buttressed by the arrival of hardened French troops, would be irresistible: he had a good deal of respect for their fighting skills. By the end of the year Ireland was occupied by 100,000 soldiers, regulars, militia, volunteers and yeomanry. However, naive military tactics led the Irish rebels to occupy Vinegar Hill in County Wexford, but, after terrible slaughter by government artillery, they were defeated on 21 June in what proved to be the turning point of the uprising.

  It was fortunate that the French found it impossible to land large bodies of troops in Ireland during 1798, for the small number that did manage it caused trouble enough. General Humbert landed at Killala in County Mayo in August 1798, when his troops behaved to the local population with traditional eighteenth-century civility rather than with revolutionary fervour. He quickly captured Ballina, Foxford and Castlebar – at the last engagement, the defeat of the militia was such an embarrassment that it came to be known as the ‘Races of Castlebar’.111 Humbert was later overwhelmed by British numbers at the Battle of Ballinamuck on 8 September, where he surrendered his small force of 844 men to Cornwallis. In contrast to the treatment of the Irish (almost all of whom were hanged), French officers and soldiers were treated as honourable prisoners of war. Rapid reinforcements were beyond the capability of the French Navy, which had to overcome administrative delay and the British blockade; a squadron under Commodore Bompard tried to get away from Brest in August, but did not manage to do so until mid September. Sir John Borlase Warren restored some of the navy’s defensive reputation when his squadron decimated Bompard’s off Lough Swilly in October 1798; of the ten vessels in the French squadron, only three escaped capture.112

  On 6 April the British cabinet took a decision that turned out to be both brilliant and decisive: to reinforce Admiral Lord St Vincent, now commanding the Mediterranean Fleet. Cruising with a powerful squadron off the south of Ireland, Rear-Admiral Sir Roger Curtis was given sealed orders that he was not to open until he was thirty leagues off the Irish coast. When he did so, he discovered that he was to take ten ships of the line down to St Vincent, who was blockading Cádiz. St Vincent immediately despatched ten of his own best ships, under the command of Thomas Troubridge, to reinforce Rear-Admiral Horatio Nelson, who was somewhere in the Mediterranean with three ships of the line, trying to find the great expedition commanded by Napoleon Bonaparte that had sailed from Toulon. The government, having misread intelligence reports, had been slow to realize that the bold French strategic move of 1798 was to strike at Egypt. Although Nelson was to miss the French fleet on its way to Alexandria, he destroyed it at the Battle of Aboukir Bay on 1 August 1798: his leading ships steered on the landward side of the anchored French ships which took them completely by surprise; only two of them survived and escaped. A relieved William Young wrote to Nelson on 3 October from the Admiralty: ‘We have been drinking your health … and have lighted up our town till there was some chance of our burning it down.’113 This overwhelming victory changed the nature of the war, bringing the Mediterranean under British control, opening up its trade, and encouraging Russia and Turkey into the war against France. The earl of Mornington did not restrain his praise when writing to Lord Grenville from India:

  I admire beyond all Greek, Roman, British, or any fame, the provident, bold, and (as it deserved) gloriously prosperous measure of reinforcing Lord St Vincent in the face of a menaced invasion and of an existing rebellion at home. Never was a public measure taken with more wisdom or spirit. I cannot doubt that this success must awaken Europe.114

  The Battle of the Nile was a glittering success, but there was little else for the British to cheer in the strategic situation at the end of 1798. The First European Coalition had collapsed. French power on the Continent was as strong as ever. In 1793 France stood alone against Europe: by 1796 Holland and Spain had changed sides to join her. Russia had contributed little to the Coalition, while Prussia, Sardinia and the Two Sicilies had retired from the fray.115 Renewed war between Austria and France was expected over a long period, provoked by growing French domination of Italy and of Switzerland, which gave them access to the mountain passes between Germany and Italy, and undermined Austrian influence in the German states. War was declared in March 1799, by ‘France recklessly, [and by] Austria with dogged resignation’.116 It was followed by the formation of the Second Coalition against France, which Britain with all her former allies, signed on 1 June. No end to European-wide conflict could be discerned.

  At least in the British administration the demands of a hard-fought war were beginning to clear out the dead wood. In 1794 General Lord Amherst, hero of the Seven Years War and commander-in-chief of the army, retired at seventy-six, to be succeeded in 1795 by the young duke of York, who, in contrast to his disappointing active fighting career, proved to be a tireless and able administrator. In the army, younger, talented and active men, such as Abercromby, Moore and Craufurd, were making their way to the top. Similar changes were taking place in the navy. Hood was sent as commander-in-chief, Mediterranean, in 1793, aged sixty-nine, and was dismissed a year later. Howe was sixty-seven when appointed as commander-in-chief, Channel Fleet. At the end of the four-day Battle of the First of June, not surprisingly, he was exhausted. He came ashore after the Channel Fleet was nearly wrecked in an easterly gale in Torbay in February 1795, but did not resign until May 1797, aged seventy-one. A handful of the most capable admirals of the older generation, such as St Vincent and Duncan, still flourished, and the solid Keith was to serve until the end of the Napoleonic War. Now Sir John Borlase Warren, Thomas Troubridge, James Saumarez and Richard Goodwin Keats were gaining seniority, while the younger Samuel Hood and Edward Pellew were making names for themselves as frigate captains. Nelson and his captains at the Battle of the Nile were on average ten years younger than those at the Battle of the First of June.117

  At home, Pitt’s political authority remained unthreatened, in spite of popular opposition to the war. But the reformer of the 1780s was, by the late 1790s, running a strongly repressive state, complete with Home Office spies and anti-labour legislation contained in the Combination Acts, of which that of 1799, ‘to prevent the unlawful Combination of Workers’, was the most severe. These were passed through parliament when there was great fear that southern England would be invaded, a fear that would not abate for the next ten years. At the same time huge sums of money were being spent on domestic fortifications, primarily at Dover Castle, and on the enormous increases in both the naval and military establishments.118 To pay for all this, Pitt’s efforts at raising taxes were beginning to bear fruit: by 1799 government tax income reached £31.7 million, in comparison with £19.3 million three years before.119 The economy, which was growing vigorously and thriving, enabled Britain to carry on the fight.* Herein lay one of the differences from earlier wars in the eighteenth century, which had been curtailed by financial exhaustion after six or seven years. The pattern of hostilities against Revolutionary France remained the same: fleet actions in European waters, amphibious expeditions against the Continent, colonial warfare, defence against invasion and diplomatic coalitions with potential allies against a more powerful foe. What was different now was that the intensity and scale of the war against the French had dramatically increased.

  4

 
; Whitehall at War 1793–1802

  The army, the navy, the public offices of government opened a career to numbers of every class, and by absorbing a very large proportion of the candidates for employment, created a corresponding briskness in agriculture, trade and professions.

  – Joseph Lowe, The Present State of England (1822)1

  A long war both required and caused the government bureaucracy to improve its efficiency. In the late eighteenth century, the civil service can be best described as a ‘patchwork’: parts of it were very competent and hard-working, while others were steeped in ancient precedent – unreformed, costly and, in some cases, useless. The Excise Department was widely held to be the most efficient, while the list at the other end of the scale included the Royal Household, the Seal Office and the Board of Works (which maintained government buildings).2 The term ‘civil service’, conveying the idea of a coherent bureaucracy, governed by common rules and hierarchy, appeared for the first time only in a Treasury letter of 1816. ‘Civil servants’ were more commonly called ‘officeholders’, and the privileged who were awarded or inherited sinecures were known scornfully as ‘placemen’.* Payments of fees and perquisites by outsiders to government officials in return for a service was a constant political irritant, particularly from the middle of the 1790s, the point at which the war initiated a great growth of government bureaucracy.

  At the centre of government was the Treasury, governed by a board of seven commissioners, whose first lord commissioner was the prime minister, the leader of the administration in office. The Whitehall policy departments such as the Foreign Office and the Home Office were relatively small. Those Whitehall departments with substantial spending, such as the Admiralty, Ordnance or Navy Office, or tax collecting responsibilities, such as the Customs or Excise, were managed by boards of commissioners, usually six or seven strong, appointed by the king.3 Each of these boards ran its own office. The Treasury had a dual function, for not only was it the primary policy department, but it also supervised the Commissariat, which was responsible for supplying and provisioning the army, leaving control of the army, jealously guarded since the civil wars of the seventeenth century, ultimately in the hands of the prime minister. In 1797 the Treasury Department contained 142 clerks, of whom 85 served the Commissariat, but these numbers nearly doubled in the following seven years.4 The army, being a decentralized, loose-knit organization composed of many regiments, dependent on the king for promotions and appointments, had no boards, though the secretary at war had 35 clerks in 1796; by 1806 they had increased fourfold.5

  This loose system at the top of government, run on personal contacts, had its limitations, especially after July 1794, when the Portland Whigs left Opposition and joined Pitt’s administration. If Pitt did not have a contact in a department, he remained ‘uninformed and powerless’.6 The prime minister could not order a minister to carry out a policy: only a decision of the whole cabinet could enable this to happen. All he could do was to persuade and to influence. The same was true of appointments, over which Pitt took great trouble, carefully selecting young men of talent.* He would encourage them by securing their appointment to select committees, or by giving them a chance to air their speaking talents – for example, by seconding the ‘Address’ in answer to the King’s Speech. His shrewdness at assessing the potential of young men was highlighted by their subsequent careers. Of thirty-four chosen by Pitt for the seventeen addresses in his first ministry, two were future prime ministers, Addington and Canning, and five became cabinet ministers. Indeed, Pitt encouraged and nurtured the early careers of the best part of two generations of politicians, stretching as far into the future as the earl of Aberdeen, who resigned as prime minister in 1855.7

  In early 1795 Canning mused in his journal on the current gossip that he was likely to be given a seat on the Board of Admiralty, but he knew that it was unlikely: ‘it must be an office in Pitt’s disposal – and these Admiralty changes are solely and exclusively the province and choice of Lord Spencer – with whom I have nothing to do.’ Some three months later Canning again, talking to Pitt, expressed his wish for office; Pitt ‘lamented indeed that the number of efficient working offices, except those of the very first rank, was so small as to make the selection of such a one as I described out of very few indeed’. One vacancy existed at undersecretary level in the Home Office, which Pitt agreed to raise delicately with the duke of Portland.8 In the event, early in 1796 Canning was appointed as undersecretary in the Foreign Office under Lord Grenville, which he hated; he referred later to ‘the disagreeableness which I experienced during my Under Sec[retaryshi]p with Lord G’.9 Pitt’s use of informal influence was illustrated in early 1797, when the prime minister fell out with his foreign secretary over the peace negotiations with France, which Grenville opposed, a question debated with ‘great violence’ in cabinet. Pitt made use of his young man, obtaining information from Canning behind his foreign secretary’s back, and altering Grenville’s drafts for the king. They proved vital for winning the policy argument.10

  A vignette of how the Treasury Board worked in practice has been left by Sylvester Douglas (later Lord Glenbervie), who was appointed to the Treasury Board in early 1797; he kept a diary full of gossip, and it is for this that he is chiefly remembered. Pitt was not present at Douglas’s first Board meeting, but he was given the following brief beforehand by a fellow commissioner, John Smyth: ‘You will find the office quite a sinecure … Mr Pitt does all the material business at his own house, signs the papers, and then the other two Lords sign them of course. Other business the Secretaries judge of without carrying it to him.’ In Pitt’s absence, proceedings were dominated by the two secretaries to the Board, who had always been close to Pitt: George Rose, who had served the prime minister since his earliest days in office, and Charles Long, a cultured lawyer with modest political ambitions, who had been a friend of Pitt at Cambridge. According to Douglas,

  The book of matters then [came] before the Board, with the date written against each when the memorial letter, etc., was received, was then taken by Smyth, who read the items one by one, when Rose chiefly or Long mentioned something of the subject – or said Mr Pitt had, or would decide upon it – or that it must be postponed, on which Smyth ticked it off. In short to an ignorant person he would have appeared to be the Secretary and Rose and Long the Board … On Thursday and Friday more formal Boards were held, for Pitt as well as Smyth and I attended … Pitt’s manner I thought awkward and not judicial, but his questions and observations were those so able a man might be expected to make. He seemed to have read the memorials with more attention than Rose, and not unwilling to show that he had.11

  Though interested in administration, William Pitt was not one to hold to formal structures and reporting chains. He ran his cabinet ministers, formally known as ‘His Majesty’s confidential servants’, very loosely. A perfunctory process had evolved for circulating Foreign Office papers between ministers, but there was otherwise little system.* In the 1790s the inner circle of ministers, Pitt, Dundas and Grenville, made the decisions, and much was done with Dundas alone at his home in Wimbledon. Dundas remembered that

  In transacting the business of the State, in forming our plans etc. we never retired to Office for that purpose. All these matters we discussed & settled either in our morning rides at Wimbledon, or in our even’g walks at that place. We were accustomed to walk in the evening from 8 oClock to sometimes 10 or Eleven in the Summer Season.12

  The prime minister preferred it that way, keeping his cards close, using his access to the king to buttress his position. Besides, he did not like writing letters, preferring to talk about a problem with the person most concerned.13 The first that Pitt’s cabinet colleagues would hear about the appointment of a new minister was when it was announced. From the beginning of the war until the end of 1797 the conclusions of only twelve minuted cabinet meetings were formally communicated to the king.* The cabinet had not developed into the official discussion forum that it was
later to become in the subsequent governments of Portland, Perceval and Liverpool.14

  Nor was Pitt very organized personally. The job of keeping him to the daily schedule fell to his private secretary, Henry Legge, who described his job as requiring ‘Secrecy, attention to answering the Letters civilly to those who desire to wait upon him, to be exact in recollecting the Hours and Days that different People are appointed to come’. And Legge added, ‘Mr Pitt is the best temper’d Man in the World, and the most pleasant to work with, for he is clear and patient, and likes to make those happy with whom he has to transact Business.’15 Among his close circle of supporters, the shy and frosty public demeanour of the prime minister disappeared.

  As well as Treasury affairs, Pitt took on the overall control of foreign policy. The stress of these years made deep inroads into the health of both politicians and administrators. It should not be forgotten that when Pitt became prime minister in 1783 at the age of twenty-four, he had already lived half his life. The intensity of the job of prime minister led to excesses of drinking, though it affected his performance only marginally.*Public speaking did not, of itself, put a strain on Pitt. According to William Huskisson, ‘he used to take a mutton chop and a glass of wine and water at three o’clock; nothing more.’ The nerves of others were more fragile. According to gossip both Castlereagh and Liverpool ‘took ether, as an excitement, before speaking’.†