Britain Against Napoleon

by Roger Knight

  During his brief tenure, Tom Grenville received a daily average of twenty-one letters from correspondents outside government: over 60 per cent were applications for posts, ashore or afloat, in the navy. Not only had he to appoint sea officers, but marine officers, chaplains, pursers, surgeons, dockyard officers, Fencibles, lieutenants to signal stations. Applications were backed by senior admirals, MPs, old aristocracy, even the archbishop of Canterbury, but were mostly from the applicants themselves. Some were heart-rending, some angry and desperate, others cynical and political. Many clearly showed how much talent and experience was being wasted. He managed to appoint unemployed officers to newly commissioned warships: some ships were entirely officered by those who had hitherto been on half-pay.75 In 116 working days at the Admiralty, he made 889 appointments, an average of just under eight per day.76

  Away from this never-ending office task, Tom Grenville thought differently from his cabinet colleagues and made some shrewd strategic decisions. In late 1806 he decided to reduce the squadron blockading Rochefort to frigates only, the beginning of a shift of ships and men away from the Channel Fleet.77Difficulties with the United States, which was sheltering French warships in the Chesapeake Bay, were beginning to emerge. Grenville chose not to augment naval forces in Bermuda, because he had intelligence of the reported wretched condition of the French ships; as he wrote to his brother, ‘besides which the French credit is so low that they can get no money to pay for the workmen, & their crews daily deserting’.

  What he did do was to prepare suitable ships for operations in the Baltic, though, as he remarked to Buckingham as late as March 1807, ‘My colleagues cannot be worked up with any Baltick interest in the present moment, tho’ I think we should be striving there.’78 In December 1806 he sent Henry Peake, the junior surveyor, together with the master shipwrights of Woolwich and Plymouth, ‘to survey ships of war of 50 guns & upwards in the several Ports, to see how soon we can patch up an additional fleet of 10 or 12 sail for the Baltick in the spring’.79 The day he left office, on 1 April 1807, he wrote to the marquis of Buckingham:

  I am lingering here in hourly expectation of my release … There is not an enemy ship at sea, & I may boast of having taken proper steps for an immediate supply of stores of hemp, etc., for 3 years, & I have added 300 artificers to the Dockyards, so that my account is reputably closed. Fremantle will have told you that I have also the credit in abstaining from making promotions for rank at the charge of the Board. I shall now breathe freely again.

  Also on his last day in office he ordered sixteen smaller ships of the line, twelve of which were already commissioned, to assemble at Yarmouth.80 These ships would form the core of the fleet used in the successful operation against Copenhagen. It did not take place until five months after he had left office, so Tom Grenville failed to receive recognition for the farseeing preparations that he had made.

  Tom Grenville aside, the Talents’ prosecution of the war had little to commend it. Lord Grenville confessed to his brother Buckingham when tired and depressed at the end of his administration, ‘I want one great and essential quality for my station … I am not competent to the management of men. I never was so naturally, and toil and anxiety more and more unfit me for it.’81 Divided and uncoordinated, the Talents fell in early 1807. Lord Grenville had again revived Pitt’s 1801 initiative to appease Catholics and dissenters by enabling them to join the services. Again the king would not have it, and the demoralized government resigned.

  The Tories in the new administration under the duke of Portland were more competent at running the war, but there were inherent flaws in this government, too. Portland was approaching seventy, suffering from gout and from a kidney stone, and had always been averse to speaking in public. Nor was he in control of his cabinet. The acrimonious atmosphere was worsened by the active intervention in affairs by the prince of Wales, who stepped into the vacuum caused by the declining mental capacity of the old king. Nevertheless, with Canning as foreign secretary, Castlereagh as secretary of state for war and Mulgrave at the Admiralty, it was a stronger team than the Talents. At the Admiralty, William Marsden managed at last to retire, succeeded by William Wellesley-Pole, brother of Lord Mornington and of Arthur Wellesley, as a fully political first secretary.*

  This was ever a war of resources. In contrast to the French Revolutionary War, the army was given time to train from 1803 (at the same time it was on invasion duties) when war was resumed. There was a strong cadre of trained and disciplined troops around which to build an army. Castlereagh, as secretary of state for war, showed an immense capacity for concentration and for absorbing detail in this task. He immediately strengthened the volunteers, restoring their inspecting officers, and granted a bounty to militiamen if they would join the regular army. By using the bounty, nearly 28,000 men who were coming to the end of their five years’ militia service were rapidly enlisted. Castlereagh restored the militia ballot and quickly brought it up to strength; he also created the local militia, which took over from the volunteers, which were slowly run down. His reforms were implemented swiftly, for soldiers were soon to be needed for overseas service.82

  The whole nature of the war in northern Europe was changing. Napoleon, at the apogee of his power after signing the Treaty of Tilsit with Russia, could now turn his attention to overcoming Britain. He wrote to his minister of marine, Decrès, in July 1807: ‘The Continental war is over. Energies must be turned towards the navy.’83 He immediately took steps to try to secure the Danish and Portuguese fleets. The British, however, anticipated these moves remarkably quickly. On 14 July, Lord Mulgrave proposed to the cabinet that a large naval force should be sent to Copenhagen to prevent the seizure of Danish ships, to which Castlereagh suggested the addition of troops. British troops under General Lord Cathcart were already at Stralsund, the last Swedish territory on the southern shore of the Baltic: they had arrived on 8 July, ready to join Swedish and Prussian forces to advance south.84 As we saw in Chapter 7, these forces came together quickly, and the bombardment of Copenhagen and the seizure of the Danish Fleet followed in early September. The misgivings over the attack on a neutral nation were debated in parliament, with William Wilberforce this time placing his moral authority behind the government.85 Strategically it relieved pressure on Britain; Lord Hawkesbury, by then home secretary, wrote optimistically to the duke of Richmond: ‘our left flank is now set completely at liberty.’86

  But the government was less than successful in its attempt to follow up this victory. It ordered an expedition of 10,000 troops to Sweden to help King Gustavus against the newly hostile Russia. The army commander was to be Sir John Moore, an outspoken, talented soldier with firm Whig proclivities, though confirmed in his appointment by Castlereagh and the Tory cabinet. Escorted by twelve ships of the line under Admiral Sir James Saumarez, the expedition reached Gothenburg on 17 May 1808. Moore described his orders as ‘inexplicit and contradictory’. Accounts of the prolonged negotiations between Moore and the Swedes read like a Whitehall farce. The ‘mad’ King Gustavus, distracted by the Russian threat to Finland, would not allow the British troops to land, and they languished for six weeks in the transports at anchor outside Gothenburg. Finally, Gustavus lost all patience with the negotiations and imprisoned Moore, who escaped in the disguise of a peasant, arriving back on board the flagship in the midst of a ball Admiral Saumarez was giving for the ladies of Gothenburg. Humiliated, Moore immediately took his forces back to England.

  Almost at the same time, conflict spread to the south of Europe. In late November 1807 a French army under General Andoche Junot invaded Portugal. The Portuguese prince regent kept his options open until the last minute, but finally decided to flee to Brazil, escorted by British warships under the command of Admiral Sir Sidney Smith. His squadron sailed from Lisbon on 29 November, together with most of the Portuguese Fleet, the contents of the Treasury, the bureaucratic infrastructure of the Portuguese state and as many as 15,000 individuals. A day later, 1,500 French troops, a
fter an immense forced march, entered Lisbon. In the words of their commander, General Junot, the soldiers were ‘in bad order and worn out with fatigue’.87 It was a graphic illustration of the speed and carrying capacity of ships, compared with the slowness and effort required for the movement of troops by land.

  The vigour of the British, for which Canning as foreign secretary can take much credit, took Napoleon by surprise. It spoilt the emperor’s master plan of wresting the maritime initiative from Britain and, at the same time, the focus of the naval war changed, for operations, ships and men were moved away from the Channel to the North Sea and Baltic, and south to the Mediterranean. Napoleon’s shipbuilding programme in Antwerp was now causing concern as a new base from which to launch a French invasion. The mouth of the Scheldt was blockaded for twelve months a year, a complex operation commanded with great skill by Admiral William Young: between 1809 and 1812 he had between 40 and 80 warships under his command, the number varying with the seasons and the assessed threat of breakout by the French Fleet.88 Young had detailed orders about which of several courses to pursue if the French Fleet did manage to escape from the Scheldt, with a view to protecting the Baltic or Ireland.89 The new invasion threat to Britain was now seen to be to the east coast, where shallow waters created their own difficulties. A very large number of British shallow-draught sloops, gunboats and gun-brigs were built from 1803 onwards, needed not only for the shallow waters there but also to meet a worldwide demand for convoys, sent to combat the continuing depredations of French privateers, which were multiplied from 1807 by the hostility of the Danes and the Dutch, and after 1812 of the Americans. As we shall see in Chapter 12, by the end of the war successive administrations had ordered the building of 174 brig-sloops and 87 smaller gun-brigs, while 50 captured enemy brigs joined the British Fleet.90

  The number of British warships on the Channel Station therefore declined dramatically. At the end of the French Revolutionary War they had stood at 75 ships crewed by 38,000 seamen.91 By September 1809 this figure had declined to only 30 smaller ships manned by 7,000 seamen, which watched the naval bases of north-west France. The Walcheren and Portuguese expeditions accounted for 51,000 seamen.92 At the same time, Saumarez in the Baltic had 62 ships and just under 15,000 seamen.93 This movement of operations away from the Channel coast imposed a strain on naval administrators because of the difficulty of maintaining and provisioning the warships. For more than a century investment had been concentrated in the facilities in the south and west of England, primarily in Portsmouth and Plymouth. The east coast of England had no deep-water ports, and assembling ships at the Nore and in the Yarmouth Roads was very problematic – even dangerous in northerly and easterly gales.*

  On the southern flank of Europe, Cuthbert Collingwood, commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean Fleet from the time of Trafalgar until his death in 1810, played a masterly defensive game. To maintain control of the Mediterranean he had, in 1807, 74 warships and over 25,000 seamen in his command, while the army numbered 31,000.94 Toulon was blockaded to deny France free use of the Mediterranean, but Sicily was always a problem: it could not be given up, because it supplied Malta with wheat, but it would be impossible to supply enough troops to defend it.95 In 1810 Napoleon tried one more time to seize it, but when he failed and it became clear that the island was no longer an objective, Britain was able to reduce its commitment there.96 For a dozen years every one of Napoleon’s moves in the Mediterranean was countered by Britain’s ability to move troops and supplies faster by ship than he could move them by land.

  The fortunes of Portland’s cabinet continued to improve. The administration reacted quickly when it heard of the Spanish uprising against French domination in Madrid on 2 May 1808. Brutal suppression in Madrid by the French ensured that a country-wide revolt against the invaders was under way by early June. In spite of cabinet doubters, a decision to support the Spanish was taken with speed, and public approval of the new initiative was strong.97 The pace of events increased. On 14 June, Sir Arthur Wellesley, whose talent was by now generally recognized, was given command of troops for Spain, which had been gathered at Cork originally for an expedition to aid General Miranda in Venezuela.98 At the same time in London a complicated plan was put in hand to transport 12,000 Spanish troops under the marquis de la Romana from Denmark to Spain, right beneath the noses of the French. This operation was closely orchestrated from Whitehall, and carried out with admirable efficiency by Rear-Admiral Richard Goodwin Keats. Though not all the Spanish troops could be embarked, 9,000 of them landed at Santander in northern Spain on 9 October, neatly using British maritime predominance in the north and south of Europe to bolster the new theatre of war.99 Further Spanish success followed. On 19 July a Spanish army beat a French force at Baylen, south of Madrid, forcing 18,000 French soldiers to surrender. On 1 August the force commanded by Wellesley landed at Mondego Bay in Portugal, a task that took five days on the open, sandy beach.100 Three weeks later he defeated the French at Vimeiro. However, a weak armistice signed by the senior but politically inexperienced general, Sir Hew Dalrymple, at the Convention of Cintra allowed the French Army to be repatriated with both their arms and their plunder from the Portuguese. The signing away of a victory shocked a disbelieving Britain, causing a further political storm, and the generals were recalled.101 A commission of enquiry was set up, chaired by General Sir David Dundas, now retired. Wellesley was implicated and lucky to get away relatively unscathed.

  Little noticed in the uproar was the successful securing of a Russian squadron of seven ships of the line, which happened to be in the Tagus when the Spanish revolt began. As agreed at the Convention of Cintra, it was closely escorted to Spithead by seven British ships of equivalent rate. The Russian ships remained anchored there, crewless, neglected and rotting, until 1812; only two sailed again.102 This marked the end of a disastrous year for Napoleon, which had begun with the prospect of his securing nearly a hundred ships of the line from the countries he now dominated; but those of Denmark, Sweden, Spain, Portugal and Russia were denied to him, mostly by decisive British actions.103

  On land, however, the tide was still far from turning in Britain’s favour. Napoleon marched with his army down to Spain at the end of 1808 and they carried all before them, causing Moore’s army to retreat, and nearly trapping it at Corunna at the end of January 1809 (see Chapter 7). On the heels of this very narrow escape came a domestic scandal. Earlier in January the commander-in-chief, the duke of York, was accused in the Commons by a newly elected maverick radical politician, Colonel Gwyllym Wardle, of making appointments corruptly influenced by York’s former mistress, Mary Anne Clarke. Whig Opposition leaders were uncomfortable with the attack and advised Wardle to drop his accusations. Lords Grenville and Grey distanced themselves throughout, the latter considering Wardle ‘an informer’ who had ‘formed an acquaintance and an intimacy with a vile prostitute to get into her secrets’.104 Wardle was, however, encouraged by William Cobbett, who was using the episode to attack the influence of the crown, and to push for parliamentary reform. In debate, however, enough members voted against the duke’s complete acquittal to force him to resign. Soon afterwards, Wardle was discredited.*

  The case not only did the army political damage but deprived it for a time of the good sense and experience of the duke, who was reinstated in 1811. His place as commander-in-chief was taken for two years by General Sir David Dundas. This tough old soldier was not going to be pushed around by the new and very young secretary at war, Lord Palmerston, and it led to a long running dispute over finance and accounting between the Horse Guards and the War Office, just at a time when all energies should have been directed at the successful prosecution of the war in Spain.105

  In spite of these strains, the government did not fall apart, because the Opposition was divided and failed to present itself to the backbenchers as a viable alternative government. A vote on the war in Spain in May 1809, for instance, was carried by the government by 230 votes to 111. A relie
ved Castlereagh wrote to his stepbrother, Charles Stewart, that the vote had

  put our friends in great heart, and given the Govt. much more weight than they have yet had. The Battle was last night waged for us … the opposition were firing into Each other’s Ranks into every direction: Tierney at Burdett, Whitbread at Tierney, Bragge at Whitbread and Folkestone at Windham – nothing could indicate more Division on their part, or determined Union on Ours than this debate did.106

  The Tory administration was soon, however, to be rocked. The failure of the very large expedition to Walcheren that set off late in the summer of 1809, as recounted in Chapter 7, was the nadir of the Portland government, and the consequent casualties among the troops caused indignation throughout the country. The disaster was debated in a two-month-long committee of the whole House of Commons. Before the troops came home, however, a duel was fought between George Canning and Lord Castlereagh. It laid bare not only the tension between the foreign secretary and the secretary of state for war – the two ministers most concerned with that formidable undertaking – but also the weakness of the cabinet ministers gathered around the sick and ineffectual duke of Portland. Canning’s sharp tongue had made him enemies and created distrust, and he was regarded by the very aristocratic cabinet, and the king, as an outsider because of his background. Canning’s supreme confidence in the power of his parliamentary oratory, and his impatience with those who did not think as fast as he did (so often the bane of very clever people) were the root causes of the dispute. He had his eye on the prime minister’s job, for he knew that on 10 May Portland had tendered his resignation to the king, who had refused to allow him to go. In order to increase his influence in the cabinet, Canning plotted to move Castlereagh, whom he regarded as slow-witted, by sidelining him to some less important post. No one else in the cabinet had the nerve to tell Castlereagh what was going on.