by Roger Knight
Not surprisingly, the British government’s distrust of Bonaparte remained acute. In spite of concern over the cost of the war, ministers were cautious about disarming. The regular army was set at 132,000, more than double the peacetime strength of the army after the end of the previous war in 1783. The 81,000 left in Britain and a further 18,000 in Ireland, as well as 48,000 militia, was more than any force that the French might be able to land with the vessels at their disposal.16 Eight months after the signing of the Amiens Treaty, in November 1802, the British Navy still had 32 ships of the line and 217 smaller ships in commission, manned by over 50,000 seamen and marines.17 Neither the fleet nor the army was put on a peace-time footing in the West Indies. In April 1803, a year after the signing of the treaty, Lord Hobart, the secretary of state for war, informed the Admiralty in a ‘most secret’ memorandum that the officer commanding the Leeward Islands squadron should obstruct the arrival of any troop reinforcements ‘at any of the French Islands’, though in the event none came across the Atlantic.18
The other area of concern was Egypt, which the government still felt was vulnerable.* At the end of 1802 the Mediterranean squadron, commanded by Rear-Admiral Sir Richard Bickerton, still consisted of eleven 74-gun ships, three 64s and forty-five smaller warships, with standing orders to keep the activities of the French warships in Toulon under surveillance. In March 1803 Bickerton received secret orders from Lord Hobart, over two months before war was renewed: ‘The desires of the Chief Consul of the French Republic are still directed to the possession of Egypt and he is not unlikely to avail himself of any favourable opportunity that may offer.’ If any French ships put to sea, Bickerton was to shadow them.19
Yet such was the confusion in the navy brought about by St Vincent’s ill-judged measures for reform in the civil administration of the navy that Bickerton’s sizeable squadron at Malta lacked supplies and provisions. Food had become scarce by June 1802: supplies from Sicily or North Africa alone did not suffice. In September men started to sicken, and by November scurvy cases were increasing rapidly. Dissatisfied at the conditions and their continued absence from England, the crew of one ship in the squadron mutinied; two men were hanged. Bickerton’s ships were in poor condition, needing major refits in British yards. In January 1803 Bickerton described his situation to the Admiralty secretary, Evan Nepean, as ‘nearly destitute’. In March 1803, he reported 403 seamen sick and 53 dead. St Vincent had ordered the closure of the naval hospital at Malta: the plight of the squadron would have been worse if the army hospital had not been available to treat the seamen. Provisions and stores did not arrive from England until 24 April 1803, only just in time for Bickerton to put his ships on a war footing.20
In the spring of 1803, Addington began to reason that if a resumption of hostilities was inevitable, they had better come sooner rather than later, and war was declared by Britain on 18 May 1803. He spoilt the moment with an uncharacteristic and misjudged act of flamboyance, by making a dramatic late entry into the House of Commons to make the announcement dressed in the colourful uniform of the Woodley Volunteer Cavalry. His enemies jeered; his friends were embarrassed.21 Thomas Grenville reckoned that Addington feared Pitt more than he did the first consul: ‘He has no other courage than in comparison of those two apprehensions, by both of which he is alternately & sometimes jointly so beset as to have ample occasion for keeping all his little wits about him’; Grenville characterized the administration as ‘this water-gruel government’.22
News from all quarters reported a familiar pattern of British reverses. The invasion threat now came from the Channel ports where Napoleon was massing his troops and building launches to bring them over to southern England. In June a French army walked into Hanover. In the north-east of England resistance to impressment erupted: a press gang was thrown out of Sunderland by seamen and keelmen, and the coal trade was brought to a halt.23 In Dublin in July 1803 a brief and uncoordinated uprising, the last flicker of the 1798 Rebellion, was led by Robert Emmet, who had been amassing an arsenal of weapons in Dublin. The former spy chief, William Wickham, now chief secretary of Ireland, was in England when the outbreak occurred and the available intelligence was misread by his clever but uncommunicative deputy, Alexander Marsden (the brother of William, second secretary of the Admiralty).* Wickham’s experienced intelligence office in London, dismantled at the peace, was sorely missed, but luckily the disorganization of Emmet’s small band of conspirators exceeded that of the Dublin government. An explosion of Emmet’s weapons burnt down a house, a disaster that caused him to bring the uprising forward; but the rebels were instantly intercepted by a patrol of soldiers that happened to be passing.24 A handful of people were killed, and Emmet was immediately captured and condemned to be hanged.* Despite his failure, the public perception was that Addington’s government had been taken unawares. William Cobbett thundered in the Weekly Political Register: ‘The government of Ireland was as completely surprised as a drunken sentinel, who [sleeps] upon his post, and who requires a good bastinado to bring him to his senses.’25
Nevertheless, in spite of domestic criticism, it was Addington who caught Bonaparte off his guard by the sudden declaration of war. Half the French warships were committed to St Dominique, and the restocking of their dockyards at home with timber and other naval stores had not been completed. By June fifty British ships of the line were blockading French ports from the Texel to Toulon.26 Unsuspecting French merchant ships fell to British warships as rich prizes. The only retaliation open to the French government was the decree of 22 May 1803: all Englishmen in France were to be arrested.27
Many were prisoners for years. One such was Walter Boyd, a loans contractor, trapped with his family, who did not see England again until 1814.28 Robert Edward Clifford, however, managed to escape. From a prominent Devon Catholic family, Clifford had trained as a soldier in France, specializing in cartography, but came back to England in 1792. During the peace he had returned to Paris, where he posed as a disinterested mathematician and scientist, but in reality was a spy. He heard much talk of the projected invasion of England and relayed his information to a family friend, Lieutenant-General John Graves Simcoe, who was close to the prime minister. When war was resumed, it was rumoured in London that Clifford and a companion had been apprehended in Calais and executed by the French authorities, and his supposed capture was deemed sufficiently important to be debated in parliament on 23 May 1803, with the galleries cleared. Charles James Fox intemperately described Napoleon as ‘the most stupendous monument of human wisdom’ and that ‘the execution of the unfortunate Gentlemen, the subject of the debates, ought in no shape to be attributed to a cruel or savage temper in the Chief Consul but to Necessity, state Necessity, the law of the Wise & the Good in Every Age’. A radical dissenting MP, William Smith, went further, applauding ‘the vigilance of Bonaparte [who] had foiled the intentions of His Majesty’s ministers and called for their impeachment, since it was they rather than Bonaparte who were “the murderers of the two gentlemen”.’* In fact, Clifford had just managed to escape on a horse-ship, accompanied by a substantial box weighing two hundredweight, full of maps of France. Within a week, he was dining with the prime minister.29
While the French imprisoned British visitors, Frenchmen caught in Britain were merely expelled.30 But, as the war gained momentum, Britain changed tack and held on to many thousands of captured French seamen and soldiers, in the interests of manpower attrition; the traditional exchanges of prisoners of war between the combatants became a thing of the past as each side tried to wear down the other. Standing up to Napoleonic France demanded a completely different type of warfare from that of 1793 to 1802. The pressure and immediacy of war did not quell the divisions in the navy, dominated by continuing, vituperative arguments between St Vincent in the House of Lords and Captain Sir Andrew Snape Hamond, the comptroller of the navy, in the Commons. George Rose thought that Hamond acted ‘with coolness, discretion and judgement’ under the first lord’s attacks, but,
in June, Hamond declared with impatience that ‘it was impossible to go on as things now stood’; he later modified this outburst to more appropriate parliamentary language, with understated irony: ‘the Navy Board was not thought so well of by the present Admiralty as by their predecessors.’31 In the spring of 1803 St Vincent’s own morale plunged when he suffered prolonged illness, possibly malaria, which he had first caught in the West Indies, and he twice offered Addington his resignation. Even though attacks on the first lord in parliament were frequent, the prime minister refused, because there was no one obvious to replace him.32
When the war resumed in May 1803, fourteen months after peace had been signed, the British dockyards were in disarray. For the last year of the Addington government, the demoralized administrators struggled. Short of timber and other stores and at the mercy of irate contractors, the dockyard officers grappled unwillingly with the first lord’s new rules.33 When William Marsden, the secretary of the Admiralty, accompanied St Vincent and the Admiralty Board on an inspection of Deptford Dockyard, they were ‘pelted with mud by the women and boys’, angered by St Vincent’s stringent economies.34
St Vincent had not got long to go.* On 12 March 1804, Charles Arbuthnot, now an undersecretary at the Foreign Office, reported to Arthur Paget, the ambassador in Vienna:
The general feeling seems to be that they cannot stand long. One bad Omen against them is that their friends who continue to give good Ministerial Votes … join as readily as the rest in bursting into fits of laughter whenever the Doctor gets up to speak. He is in truth a lost Man in the House of Commons, & as contempt is the worst evil that can befal[l] a Man, I sh[oul]d think it scarcely possible that a poor wretch so universally despised & laught at can continue much longer …35
Pitt took advantage of Addington’s weakness and came out in open opposition in the Commons, choosing to attack over naval administration, since there was clearly a gulf between the prime minister and his first lord. Pitt took advice on naval matters from a wide spectrum of politicians, including Lord Camden, Charles Long and William Wilberforce; and from two naval officers, Admiral Sir Charles Middleton, the former comptroller of the navy and member of the Board of Admiralty, and Captain Sir Home Popham – and it was Popham who advised him to question St Vincent’s blockade strategy, by advocating a concentration of effort on the building of gunboats for defence. This was risky, for Popham had misjudged general naval sentiment. Those naval officers in parliament who were not in favour of more gunboats were swayed by a forceful speech by Admiral Sir Edward Pellew, who condemned gunboats as ‘the most contemptible force that can be employed’.* Pitt lost the motion, but it weakened Addington, and the government fell a month later on the question of the Army Estimates.36
Pitt returned to form another government in May 1804, though his political authority was a shadow of what it had once been, and from the start he and his ministers were under constant hostile attack from the Opposition, with Grey and Sheridan in the van.37 Senior personnel changed again at the top of the Admiralty. Lord Grenville, now at some distance from Pitt, declined to join the administration. Henry Dundas, who had been ennobled in 1802 as Lord Melville, took over as first lord, immediately reversing St Vincent’s policies. Stores contracts were quickly renewed; warships were sent to merchant yards for repair. Not least, Melville had to restore the loss of trust within the service. He wrote to Admiral Colpoys not long after he had taken over: ‘There is not a day passes on which I do not receive twenty letters, claiming favour from me, because the writers have been ill used by Lord St Vincent … and all I can with propriety do … is deal with the Distribution of Naval Favours with as much fairness and impartiality as I possibly can.’38
To get more ships to sea, Melville took measures every bit as radical as St Vincent’s, but in direct opposition to them, in particular employing far more contractors.39 He also reorganized the ships on station and redistributed the inadequate number of ships available to him, with the aid of his knowledgeable private secretary William Budge. He kept most of the seventy ships of the line blockading the French ports, since Napoleon’s army of invasion was now at its most threatening (see Chapter 9).† Melville ordered Admiral Cornwallis off Brest to take no risks with his ships in the winter gales. The most controversial event of Melville’s time as first lord was the order to seize the silver-laden Spanish frigates as they approached Cádiz from Mexico, even though Spain and Britain were not at war. This cabinet decision was unquestionably illegal, but it was decided on the basis of intelligence that Spain intended to declare war once the silver was safely in port.* Unfortunately, only frigates were sent to intercept the Spanish ships, and honour therefore demanded that the Spanish commander should fight back, since he was faced by ships of near-equal size. One of the Spanish ships blew up, killing almost all the crew, as well as the families of Spanish officers returning home to Spain.40 Although war with Spain was virtually inevitable, and Britain was therefore extremely vulnerable at this point in the war, the interception of the Spanish treasure ships was widely unpopular. Melville was extremely distressed by the episode, for which he was ultimately responsible.41
He was, however, soon to resign, undone by domestic politics. Doubt was thrown on his integrity, when treasurer of the navy in the 1780s, by the publication of the Tenth Report of the Commission of Naval Enquiry in February 1805.42 The report focused on the whereabouts of monies that should have been kept at the Bank of England but that had, in fact, been lodged in Coutts Bank by the paymaster of the navy, Alexander Trotter, who acted for the treasurer of the navy by virtue of a power of attorney. Suspicions were raised when both Melville and Trotter refused to answer some of the commission’s questions. The practice of keeping money in a private account had been specifically prohibited in 1782, and had ceased in 1802.† The central issue was whether Melville knew of Trotter’s activities in the 1780s and 1790s, or whether Melville had even profited from the arrangement. At the very least, he had been foolish in not keeping a proper check on a subordinate.*
The Tenth Report came to be debated in parliament on 8 April 1805, in an atmosphere of high political excitement, during a motion of censure brought by the brewer MP Samuel Whitbread. Opinions were divided: although many speakers saw the issue as important enough to be considered beyond party divisions, the debate was intense and virulent, for Melville had many enemies. Canning reminded the House that it was Melville who in 1795 had defended General Grey and Admiral Jervis after they had been brought before the House for their handling of prize money in the West Indies, and witheringly commented on the ‘violence and invective’ of a Whig attacker: ‘I little expected that, in his present defenceless state, attempts to hunt him down would have been made by the kindred of Mr Charles Grey and the friends of Sir John Jervis.’43 It was not an atmosphere in which sober judgement stood much chance.
The debate seemed to be going Melville’s way, until late at night William Wilberforce spoke: he later recalled that when he rose to speak Pitt turned round from the front bench and looked at him: ‘It required no little effort to resist the fascination of that penetrating eye.’ But Wilberforce was not cowed and strongly condemned Melville, concluding, ‘I really cannot find language sufficiently strong to express my utter detestation of such conduct.’44 It was a decisive intervention, swaying perhaps, as some thought, as many as forty votes against Melville. The result of the debate was a tie, 216 votes to each side, thus ensuring that the speaker had to vote. Charles Abbot, ‘white as a sheet’ and after some minutes, cast in favour of the motion. The House erupted into ‘huzzas and shouts’ from the Opposition. Pitt was in any case not well, and was visibly shaken: according to one observer, he was brought to tears.45 Melville’s reputation was ruined, and he resigned from the government and from the Privy Council, his active political career over. He avoided a guilty verdict when the issue came before the Lords in a seventeen-day impeachment trial in April 1806: it was a spectacular theatrical event held in Westminster Hall that banished al
l thoughts of the war for the duration of its proceedings.*
But the war continued to be the most pressing issue and the swift appointment of a new first lord of the Admiralty was necessary. Pitt offered it to the home secretary, Robert Banks Jenkinson, Lord Hawkesbury, later to become the prime minister as Lord Liverpool, who thought it would be promotion: he wrote to his father, old Lord Liverpool: ‘It is certainly the Office next to that of prime minister of the most Importance and of the Greatest Power and Responsibility.’ But he refused it, pleading lack of seniority and of confidence that he would be able to calm ‘that Party Spirit which has of late been spreading itself very widely in the … Navy’.46 No politicians or serving admirals seemed up to the job. The prime minister surprised friends and critics alike by appointing the veteran Admiral Sir Charles Middleton, who agreed to serve provided he gained a peerage: he became Lord Barham. He had, in any case, been advising Melville and his assumption of office was achieved with the minimum of fuss. The new second secretary to the Admiralty Board, John Barrow, later wrote that usually a newly appointed first lord would
