Britain Against Napoleon

by Roger Knight

  The extraordinary journey of the resourceful Hugh Cleghorn to Ceylon in 1795 and 1796 illustrates the advantages and problems of the overland route in wartime. Cleghorn, at this point over sixty, was a nephew of Adam Smith and formerly professor of civil history at the University of St Andrews; he had also been a magistrate with William Wickham in London and worked for the Alien Office. In February 1795, Cleghorn suggested to Henry Dundas that, through private contacts, he should attempt to ‘detach’ a private Swiss regiment from its contract with the Dutch East India Company and to bring it into British service. Political allegiances were changing (the British withdrew from Holland in April) and by the middle of May 1795 the Dutch had been forced to come to terms with the French. Cleghorn knew that the owner of the regiment, Colonel le comte de Meuron, was ‘extremely disgusted’ with his Dutch employers. De Meuron had 1,200 well-trained men in Ceylon, Cochin and Batavia, and the regiment was, as Cleghorn described it, the ‘chief European Force of the Dutch on the other side of the Cape’.71 After conferring with the king, Dundas immediately approved.

  Cleghorn left England within a fortnight, was in Hamburg on 7 March and in Neuchâtel by the end of the month, talking to the comte, who agreed that his regiment should change sides, and that he should set out for Ceylon with Cleghorn as soon as possible. The douceur of £5,000 suggested by Dundas proved not to be necessary: making good arrears of pay and the promotion of the comte above the rank of colonel were incentives enough. By 13 May they were in Venice, from where they took a ship to Alexandria, arriving in Cairo by 17 June. From Cairo, Dundas received one of his more exotic intelligence reports, Cleghorn ending the missive: ‘I write under the continuous interruptions of camel drivers.’ On 3 July, at Suez, the two men took passage on a pilgrim ship down the Red Sea, were shipwrecked and briefly imprisoned at Jedda, after which they took an Arab ship to Tellichery on the Malabar coast in India, crossing the southern tip of India. They arrived in Ceylon, having made the passage in an open boat. By 13 October, Cleghorn had moved to Madras to make contact with the British East India Company. Two weeks later he was able to write to Dundas that the Meuron regiment had changed sides and that his mission had been successful, only eight months after he had first suggested it in London.72 Trincomalee had already surrendered in late August, after a siege that had cost only fifteen British lives. After much negotiation, Colombo was to follow on 15 February 1796. It had been a virtually bloodless conquest. Though Ceylon as a whole was not under British control until 1815, after considerable bloodshed, Britain had secured the route to India, and, in Trincomalee, a most valuable naval base.

  Cleghorn’s journey illustrates the exigencies of long-distance travel in wartime and was smoothed not only by despatches from London to all the consuls likely to be in a position to help him, but also by government credit of £4,000, plus £1,500 for expenses, to be drawn on the bank of Sir Robert Herries. Government and the City thus combined to enable Cleghorn to travel fast and light. He drew £300 from George Baldwin in Alexandria on the way out and £350 from the British consul in Malta on his return journey (though here he had to spend some time in the lazaretto under quarantine). On the way back to England he journeyed from Naples to Corsica, at this time in British hands, where he delivered intelligence to Gilbert Elliot, the viceroy, before returning to Naples to undertake tasks for the ambassador, Sir William Hamilton, all the while dodging the French armies, on which he sent intelligence reports back to London, and visited Wickham in Geneva. By 14 July 1797 Cleghorn was back in London at an address in Old Cavendish Street.73

  Successful episodes like this, however, which drew on efficient intelligence and communications systems, were few and far between in the French Revolutionary War, and the years between 1794 and 1799 saw a succession of non-events and failures. Planning for a landing at Den Helder took place during 1796, but, although Admiral Duncan planned to attack Den Helder in the summer of 1797, the mutiny at the Nore intervened, and nothing materialized until 1799. The French invasion attempt on Ireland in the winter of 1796 highlighted one weak link in the intelligence chain in Switzerland, where William Wickham’s activities, by now well known to the French, were becoming untenable. The French brought pressure on the neutral Swiss to have him ejected, a threat increased by 70,000 French troops on the border at Basle, and communications became so difficult that he was virtually isolated. Two senior leaders of the United Irishmen, Lord Edward FitzGerald and Arthur O’Connor, went to Basle to consult General Lazare Hoche about arrangements for a projected invasion of Ireland. Wickham’s agents lost them at the border, the revolutionaries completed their talks with Hoche, and the expedition to Bantry Bay was formalized.74 Fortunately for Britain, as we saw in Chapter 3, defective French naval organization and confusion in the Directory ensured the expedition’s failure.

  The year 1798 saw the biggest blunder of British intelligence in the French Revolutionary War, for, in the successful invasion of Egypt, the French sprang a major strategic surprise. In February of that year Bonaparte was inspecting French troops in the Channel ports and was seen there by a British agent, but on 5 March the Directory decided that the young French general should lead the Egyptian expedition.75 Several reports reached London in early 1798 of a very large armament of ships and soldiers at Toulon, but with no information as to the destination of the expedition. Intelligence gathering was being made more difficult by the British Fleet’s having withdrawn west of the Strait of Gibraltar: St Vincent was commanding the Mediterranean Fleet off Cádiz. Receiving instructions from the Admiralty to re-enter the Mediterranean, he sent Nelson off on 8 May with three ships of the line, to find out what the French were up to, as we saw in Chapter 3. In the meantime, many theories and despatches were flowing into London as to the destination of the expedition: Ireland, Portugal, Naples, Sicily or Sardinia?

  It transpired that each Whitehall department had its own theory. Consequently, none of the information held was distributed among, or discussed with, other departments, or at least not quickly enough to be of any use. The Foreign Office, as usual, had the earliest intelligence: that the French transports were being issued with biscuit for only ‘three months’ provisions’ – sure evidence of the expedition’s limited range and capability. The despatch containing this information came from Thomas Jackson, the minister in Turin, and was written on 31 March and passed on speedily to the Admiralty on 24 April, for the Foreign Office wanted warships in the western Mediterranean to encourage Austria to re-enter the war. Nepean, who was convinced that the French were intent upon Ireland, chose not to send the despatch on to the secretary for war, Henry Dundas, until 28 June.76 Lord Grenville also received a long, reasoned letter, written on 16 April, from John Udney, the British consul in Leghorn, who had asked his merchant contacts for advice. Udney wrote persuasively about Egypt as the possible destination, and the concomitant threat to India.77 Grenville did not pass on the contents of the letter.*

  In late April, Henry Dundas received reports from another source – the Secret Committee of the East India Company – about what was likely to happen in India if the French successfully invaded Egypt.78† He also had information from Mauritius that the French were pulling together a force to mount an expedition against India. By the end of the month he had reached the conclusion that Egypt was Bonaparte’s target, and so began to ask for reports from various experts on the effect that this might have and whether the French could break out of the Red Sea. Within the East India Company the conviction was growing that the French were going to head eastwards. On 9 June the Secret Committee of the Company wrote to the three presidencies at Bombay, Madras and Calcutta to say that Bonaparte was heading for Egypt, and that they were sending out 4,000 troops immediately. The commander-in-chief of the East Indies station, Admiral Rainier, took the precaution of sending two warships to cover the mouth of the Red Sea before he had definite intelligence of the French invasion.79

  Then the British had a stroke of luck. An agent for transports, Lieutenant William
Day, was arranging a cartel for the exchange of prisoners of war in Genoa, a city that was still in theory neutral, though threatened by a French army. Day observed transports were being fitted for the French expedition, and his expert eye could tell that the merchant vessels being collected were not seaworthy enough for a voyage outside the Strait of Gibraltar, casting strong doubt on the possibility that the expedition was destined for Portugal or Ireland. On 31 March, Day wrote to the Admiralty; and on 13 April he reported to Admiral Lord St Vincent off Cádiz that 120 transports for troops were preparing, as well as large casks, possibly for use as buoys in shallow water, ‘but they [the transports] will be in a dreadful state whenever they put to sea’.80 Day then went back to London at high speed by the land route, taking only two weeks, and immediately had an interview with Lord Spencer.81 On 1 May the first lord wrote rapidly, though still tentatively, to St Vincent that it was ‘most probable that they are destined either for the coast of Spain or Naples, or (though I can scarce believe it) for the Levant’.82 Crucially, there was no mention of Egypt – even as a possibility – and the omission of this vital word was to have a baleful influence on Nelson’s efforts to find the French. Spencer’s letter of 1 May was the last letter to reach Nelson before he sailed up the Mediterranean.

  However divided it was in opinion, the cabinet acted with unusual decision. On 1 May 1798 it decided to order ten battleships, under Admiral Sir Roger Curtis, away from the Channel Fleet to reinforce the Mediterranean Fleet under Lord St Vincent. The order was sent on 2 May. Curtis received it six days later as his squadron anchored in Beer Haven, a harbour off Bantry Bay.83 On 19 May, Bonaparte’s fleet departed from Toulon, escorting 280 transports containing 48,662 troops.84 Curtis’s ships from the Channel Fleet reached St Vincent off Cádiz on 24 May. The same day St Vincent sent off his ten best ships, provisioned for six months, under Captain Thomas Troubridge to reinforce Nelson. This effectively sealed shut the information window from London. By 8 June, Nelson was joined off Toulon by Troubridge and, with what was now a formidable squadron, he sailed south. He had, however, another source of intelligence, one that was more accurate than anything obtained officially, and to which he clearly paid a good deal of attention. A letter of 26 April from John Udney, whom Nelson had known from earlier service off the coasts of Italy, is still preserved in Nelson’s papers:

  My private Ideas on the present situation … their first attempt will be on Malta, from thence to invade Sicily to secure that granary and then Naples … Whatever their views afterwards maybe … time will shew … I for my own part … getting possession of Egypt; am convinced Buonaparte will hereafter & with more reason, in his unbounded enterprises, pursue the same scheme of Seizing and fortifying Alexandria, Cairo and Suez. If France intend uniting with Tippo Said against our possessions in India, the danger of losing half an Army in crossing the Desert from Egypt would be no obstacle.85

  Udney’s instincts on Bonaparte’s destination were correct. The Knights of St John surrendered Malta to the French on 11 June, and for the rest of the month and July 1798 Nelson, still guessing, searched for the huge French Fleet. He headed eastwards for Egypt as speedily as he could, but overshot the French, slowed by their troopships and transports, which were sailing slowly along the coast of Crete before heading south to Egypt. Nelson reached Alexandria, missing the arrival of the French by only twenty-four hours. George Baldwin, the British consul in Alexandria, was absent on leave: had he been there, Nelson would have delayed for a few vital days.86 Eventually, after doubling back to Sicily to reprovision, he caught up with the French ships of the line at anchor in Aboukir Bay on 1 August. Had Nelson known of the dawning suspicions of ministers in London about Egypt, the probability is that he and his powerful squadron would have caught and decimated Bonaparte’s overcrowded warships and transports at sea before they landed the army. History would have taken a different course.

  From May neither St Vincent nor Nelson had the information that was available in London. Spencer’s letters carry no conviction and reflected the broad views of Nepean and the naval members of the Board.87 The only cabinet minister with a different perspective was Dundas, influenced by his contact with the East India Company. To cap this inept performance, Spencer’s urgent letter of 1 May from London to St Vincent off Cádiz was sent by a frigate that was then ordered to escort a convoy, thus arriving by the slowest means possible. St Vincent complained to Nepean: ‘What could have possessed you to put a letter of so much importance requiring the quickest despatch, on board a ship charged with a convoy?’88 Dundas, with considerable justification, carried out a post-mortem of all intelligence received, which included a far from complete list from Nepean of despatches received by the Admiralty.89 When Dundas finished his review at the end of September, he wrote a depressed letter to Grenville:

  I hate to indulge retrospective melancholy, but in this instance I cannot relieve my mind from it. If we had not been too incredulous as to the object of Buonaparte’s armament, I think that such instructions would have been given to Sir Horatio Nelson as would have prevented him from leaving Alexandria, after he had once reached it in the auspicious and promising way he did.90

  On 1 October, Dundas sent Nepean’s list on to his undersecretary, William Huskisson, commenting, ‘I shall drop that subject for the moment.’91 Dundas thought, rightly, that a major failure had occurred and felt that Nepean had obstructed information about a possible Egyptian destination. Recriminations were checked by the news of the Nile victory, which reached London on 2 October. Yet Dundas did not forget: in May 1799 he had a clerk draw up a comprehensive list of fifty pieces of incoming intelligence during the summer of 1798.92

  He did not get the improvement he was looking for, at least not immediately. The next year another major failure occurred when a large French Fleet of twenty-five ships of the line under Vice-Admiral Eustache Bruix left Brest and got past the blockading British Fleet and into the Mediterranean. The first intelligence signs that another big operation was under way were evident in early January 1799, when D’Auvergne in the Channel Islands picked up information on increased French activity. Unfortunately, at the end of that month he received, but overlooked, very solid information that the operation was aimed at the Mediterranean: he learnt that naval commissaries were travelling south through France by land to organize shipping.93 The French also tried disinformation by planting false orders on a small French vessel, the Rebecca, picked up by the British lugger Black Joke, intended to point ministers’ suspicions towards Ireland. The naval members of the Admiralty Board saw through the French ruse early, but that summer Lord Spencer was absent, taking the waters at Bath, and so the naval view was not reflected in discussions when the major decisions were taken by Pitt, Dundas and Grenville.94

  On a foggy morning on 26 April 1799, Bruix slipped away from the one British frigate on station outside Brest. His orders were to destroy the dispersed British Fleet in the Mediterranean, and primarily to relieve the besieged French forces in Malta, Corfu and Egypt. The covering British frigate missed the French ships. The fleet was out, and once more the government in London did not have the slightest idea where it was going, assuming almost as a reflex action that it must be Ireland. Bridport and the British Channel Fleet were sent to cruise off the southern Irish coast. But Bruix went south and on 3 May appeared off Cádiz with twenty-five ships of the line, threatening the Mediterranean Fleet, at this point under Lord Keith, whose ships were dispersed: he had only fifteen battleships. In a rising gale Keith formed a line, but Bruix, conscious of the main objective of the mission, and the worsening weather, headed off into the Mediterranean; had he been bolder, he could have destroyed the smaller, dispersed British Fleet. Bruix then received further orders to help the French Army in Italy by ferrying supplies, after which he returned to the Atlantic, taking some Spanish battleships with him; he re-entered Brest on 8 August, having achieved nothing.95 Britain had been lucky again, but signs of inter-departmental strain were contained in a letter
written by Huskisson to a relatively junior naval captain, Home Popham, referring disparagingly to Nepean at the Admiralty:

  I trust that you will not be thwarted by the routine Oracle who presides over our naval operations, by having got the ear of our First Lord. I wish this self-important little man had the Emperor of Russia at his elbow, I think he would make him bestir himself a little more.96

  Such frustration was symptomatic of the relations in Whitehall in the late 1790s.

  In London, much hope was invested in the Second Coalition, signed in June 1799 with Russia, Austria and lesser powers, negotiated by Pitt and Grenville. The main British effort was an invasion of Holland at Den Helder in August, for which the British transported Russian troops from the Baltic to fight alongside their own. While the operation captured the remainder of the Dutch Fleet that had not been lost at Camperdown two years before, as a military operation it had little effect on the war. Intelligence assessments of the level of support that could be expected from the Dutch population were wide of the mark, due to the enthusiasm of Orangeists exiled in London. Etches, too, was over-optimistic from the reports from his network of agents at the Texel and other Dutch ports reporting on Dutch-ship movements.* He had been urging action against Holland over some years in his secret correspondence with Nepean.97 Wickham returned to the Continent, where he presided over the disastrous involvement of one of his agents, the reckless and inexperienced James Talbot, who plotted to assassinate the Directory, an episode of which the higher echelons of the British government were unaware.98 Before he had finished, Talbot had expended the huge sum of £377,807.99