Britain Against Napoleon

by Roger Knight

  Alongside the formation of the militia and volunteers, coastal artillery and fortifications had been constructed. The fortifications, however, were not in a good state, and from the start of the Napoleonic War they were subject to improvement from several parts of the military machine, since responsibilities were confused. Permanent fortifications were under the charge of the Board of Ordnance: from Selsey in Sussex to Cromer in Norfolk over fifty batteries and redoubts of various sizes had to be maintained and provided with cannon.95 They were in the hands of the Board’s chief engineer, whose title, in 1802, was changed by royal warrant to inspector-general of fortifications and works. Lieutenant-General Robert Morse filled the post in 1803, described by Lord Cornwallis as ‘a good old fellow upon the whole, but no warrior’.96 Large forts, or ‘redoubts’, were built at Eastbourne, Dymchurch and Harwich, each with ten guns, and not finished until late in the war.97 However, the quartermaster-general in the Horse Guards was responsible for ‘Fieldworks’, i.e., works that were not permanent; but this could, and did, lead to friction with the Ordnance, for the definition of ‘temporary’ and ‘fieldworks’ was subject to wide interpretation.98 Matters were further complicated in that temporary works also fell under the domain of the generals commanding the military districts; and the master-general of the Ordnance staked a claim as well, Lord Chatham grandly informing the secretary of state for war that

  Strictly speaking, all fieldworks merely should be communicated to me before the King’s Pleasure is signified for their execution to the Commander-in-Chief, as involving great demands for men, guns, stores, etc., etc., except where they are so inconsiderable as to be defended and armed by the field train at the disposal of the general commanding.99

  This struggle was never finally settled, and it was made more complex by Treasury control over funds, and army or Ordnance officers needed to go through a complex bureaucratic procedure before money could be spent on defence works. Land purchase was undertaken through the provisions of the Defence Act of 1803. Perhaps the most celebrated of the purchases at this time was that of the site at Shorncliffe near Sandgate on the Kent coast, recommended by General Sir David Dundas in 1804, where the light infantry, so distinguished later in the fighting in Spain, were trained by Lieutenant-General Sir John Moore.100 A contract was signed to build a road running along the top of the North Downs between Guildford and Rochester, known as the ‘Chalk Ridge Communication’, to enable troops to move laterally across the system of roads. Though its track is not clear today, the work was completed by 1804.101 To improve communications across the Thames, a raft, presumably hauled with ropes from each side of the river, was constructed between Blackwall and the Greenwich marshes, on the line of the present-day Blackwall Tunnel.102 Rather more dramatic was the scheme to flood the Lea Valley to the east of London to stop an enemy advance after a landing on the Essex coast. A dam and a ‘floating gate’ were constructed at Four Mills, Bow, under the supervision of John Rennie, who considered that it would take twenty-six days stoppage of the river before the flooding was complete. Under his direction it was partially completed, but abandoned after the end of the first invasion scare in 1805.

  The most renowned measure of these years was the building of the Martello Towers, best known because so many of them have survived. The idea of the towers stemmed from the experience of those on the headlands in Corsica, one of which, at Mortella Bay, caused British warships under Hood in 1794 considerable damage when they attacked the island, a result that was closely noted by General Dundas when he briefly commanded British troops there. These round towers were about thirty feet high with very thick walls to withstand bombardment; a single 24-pound gun was mounted at the top of each one. As a result of this effective performance, fifteen of these towers were built in Minorca when the island was recaptured by Britain in 1798.103 A comprehensive scheme for the defence of the south coast of Britain was drawn up in the same year by Major Thomas Vincent Reynolds from the Ordnance Survey, based on his deep knowledge of the coast and country of southern England.* Reynolds listed 143 suitable sites for ‘Martella’ Towers between Littlehampton and Great Yarmouth, of which he considered 73 as ‘urgently necessary’, 48 ‘necessary’ and 22 as ‘desirable’. Detailed planning for building fortifications to counter invasion had been shelved in 1798 when the danger was thought to have passed and French energies had been put into the expedition to Egypt.104 Developing fortifications had not been considered in 1801 when Napoleon started to build up his forces at the Channel ports during the peace negotiations before Amiens, even though Boulogne was bombarded by a flotilla under Nelson.105 Now the threat was palpable. General David Dundas, based at the Horse Guards, and Lieutenant-Colonel Harry Calvert, the adjutant-general, became key figures. The towers were first urged on the House of Commons by William Windham in December 1803 when he was out of office, but disagreements between opponents and supporters of the new towers among the military led to delay in building. Henry Dundas, back in government in May 1804, revived these plans for tower defence and developed them into official policy.106

  The debate over the building of the towers was reopened and settled at a conference at Rochester in Kent on 21 October 1804, attended by all the leading figures responsible for the military defence of the country: the prime minister, William Pitt, the secretary of state for war, Lord Camden, the master-general of the Ordnance, Lord Chatham, and the commander-in-chief, the duke of York. Generals Dundas, Brownrigg and Morse and Lieutenant-Colonel William Twiss, the chief engineer in the Southern District, were also in attendance, as was Lieutenant-Colonel Brown of the Royal Staff Corps, who was to be responsible for the building of the military canal. Viewing the proceedings with a jaundiced eye, unsurprisingly in the light of the bureaucratic divide, he wrote in his diary:

  At this meeting the expensive and diabolical system of Tower Defence was finally resolved on to an unprecedented extent … but it was carried by the influence of the Ordnance people … only whose opinions were by no means supported by reasoning … Mr Pitt, from whom one would have expected a decided opinion, gave in to that of others … without requiring (what indeed he could not have obtained) a satisfactory and well-digested plan of defence. All that was advanced was Tower, Tower, Tower …107

  Building started in the spring of 1805 under the supervision of the main contractor, William Hobson. A standard tower contained 700,000 bricks, of a distinctive dirty-yellow colour, most of them purchased by Hobson from the London brickfields; by placing the first orders quietly with smaller brickmakers, he managed to obtain a good price before the scale of the government requirement was known.108 When work stopped on the south coast chain in 1808, 73 towers and two 11-gun circular forts had been built. A further 29 towers were built on the coasts of Essex and Suffolk, between St Osyth Stone and Aldeburgh, and one additional tower was added at Seaford in Sussex before all construction in southern England finished in 1812.109 The final towers were built at Hackness and Crockness in Orkney in 1814 as protection for harbours against the depredations of American privateers.110

  The towers were strong, with walls varying in thickness from six to thirteen feet, with the thickest segment facing seaward, the only direction from which there was likely to be a heavy bombardment. The bricks were bedded in hot lime mortar, a mixture of lime, ash and hot tallow calculated to withstand bombardment. A flat roof, supported by a central column from the base of the tower, carried the 24-pounder, mounted on a sliding traverse carriage that enabled it to fire through 360 degrees.* These towers had the potential to be devastating to boats carrying troops towards a beach, but success would depend upon the quality and training of those who manned them, and the support provided by other troops. When the question of who should man the towers had arisen during planning, Henry Dundas, over dinner at Walmer Castle with Pitt, is supposed to have said, ‘Give us the towers and we’ll find men!’ Each tower required twenty-four men and an officer. Lord Chatham’s idea was for them to be manned from a veteran battalion. 111 At Pev
ensey, in October 1804, the tower was commanded by a corporal and sixteen gunners from the eighth Invalid Battalion of the Royal Artillery.* The towers were guarded by the militia. The Fife Militia, for instance, guarded the tower and redoubt at Dymchurch in 1806 and 1807.112 In March 1807, when Windham abolished the volunteers, the South Pevensey Legion was disbanded, ‘with the exception of the Eastbourne Company under the command of Captain Augur consisting of 120 privates’.113 Windham’s sudden announcement that the militia should take on all duties could not be implemented immediately, and coastal defence continued to depend upon volunteers.

  Britain had used the lull of 1805 to 1807 to improve its defences. Early ideas of flooding Romney Marsh to render the country impassable were put aside because of doubts over the speed at which the Marsh would flood by opening Dymchurch Wall to the sea or by damming the River Rother. Instead, the idea of a canal with a defensive bank, from New Romney westwards across the top of Dungeness, with cannon at intervals, was put forward in September 1804 by Lieutenant-Colonel John Brown of the Royal Staff Corps, responsible to the quartermaster-general, and approval was given by Pitt immediately.114 Not only would the canal act as a barrier to invading troops, but it could also be used to move defending troops and supplies along its length. The project was taken on by the Quartermaster-General’s Department and classed as a ‘fieldwork’; its construction was started by the contractors who had only recently finished excavating the London Docks, and supervised by John Rennie as chief engineer. In spite of employing hundreds of men, it proceeded very slowly, and the work was taken over by the Staff Corps under Brown.115 With the help of other contractors, a work force of 1,500 men was assembled; and, when assisted by several small steam engines for pumping, progress was much faster, in spite of the difficulties of working through the cold and wet winter of 1805/6. By April 1806 ten miles of navigation had been completed, and in August of that year the dukes of York and Cambridge were towed in a small boat by horses along eighteen and a half miles of the canal in under three hours, at an average speed of seven miles an hour.116 The canal construction was not without criticisms over its cost and perceived effectiveness. In October 1805 Lord Ellenborough, lord chief justice and soon to be in the cabinet in the Ministry of All the Talents, walked the length of the canal and then wrote to his friend Addington, now out of office: ‘It will cost an enormous sum of money, and be, in my poor judgement, of no adequate use. An invading enemy will, by means of fascines,* get over it in any part they please in a very short time’ – a harsh, inexpert judgement from a government opponent.117 Though not yet complete, by mid 1807 the Royal Military Canal formed a tolerable military barrier.†

  In different ways, other newly built canals had a beneficial effect upon Britain’s security. The Grand Union Canal, connecting London to the industrial centres of the Midlands and the north, and its Paddington Basin opened in 1801. First, it enabled explosives to travel on a nationwide system of canals, rather than by coastal shipping, subject to the depredations of French privateers. The canal enabled the Ordnance to construct a major ammunition and equipment depot at Weedon Bec, built on a grand scale and fortified. Weedon is eight miles west of Northampton, nearer to Birmingham, the main manufacturing centre for small arms, and 120 miles from the nearest coast and thus much less exposed to French attack than Woolwich Arsenal on the Thames, east of the centre of London.118 It was also identified as a possible place of refuge for the royal family and the government, if the French had landed and were threatening London. The canals could be used for moving troops efficiently as well. In December 1806 the Talents ministry sent two brigades of regulars totalling 5,000 soldiers urgently to Dublin. One brigade travelled from London by canal to Liverpool, where it was trans-shipped. The two brigades received their orders on 10 December and were in Dublin by 8 January 1807, a journey of less than a month for a large body of men.119

  The expense of both the Royal Military Canal and the Martello Towers was insignificant compared with the costs of the works on the Chatham Lines and Dover Castle, upon which the defence of southern England ultimately depended. An 1804 estimate for eighty-eight Martello Towers came to £221,000.120 Extensive work on the fortifications at Chatham and the building of Fort Pitt and Fort Clarence, part of the lines defending the dockyard, started in 1805 and continued until 1812.121 Even more expense was incurred by the Ordnance on Dover Castle, which at times had a workforce of over 1,000, under the charge of Lieutenant-Colonel William Twiss. Using the massive medieval structure, but ruthlessly levelling parts of it, Twiss skilfully achieved ‘a grafting operation’, rather than building anew.122 The works at the Castle itself were complete by 1803, but huge sums were expended for the rest of the Napoleonic War on the adjoining Western Heights that commanded the vitally important port of Dover, which had to be denied to the enemy at all costs. Fieldworks were improved, underground works and massive barracks were built. These sophisticated fortifications protected an ‘entrenched camp’ containing 5,000 or 6,000 troops, manning 139 large guns: in 1816 an estimated total cost of the works reached £402,999.* However, this sum did not include the London brick, which accounted for the largest proportion of the building materials, nor did it account for all the labour. During 1797, for instance, nearly 300 men from the East Suffolk Militia and the Montgomery Militia were employed on the works.123 Twiss also put in a massive 180-foot-long shaft with three circular stairways to enable troops to be moved rapidly up to the top of the Heights or down to sea level. The work was continued through the war, but in later years funding became sporadic and they remained unfinished in 1815; Colonel William Ford, the resident engineer at Dover, complained of

  the manner in which the great question of the fortifications of this country is treated by the Government. In a state of alarm expense is not considered; when that alarm subsides, we discontinue our operations; if the financial system is hard pressed, we are ordered to suspend our works, and the regular plan, which is conducive to the safety of the state is lost sight of in some more immediate and pressing service.124

  As we have seen, the government was also continuously concerned at the potential for attack by the French on Ireland. Fortifications there were hardly less extensive than in England, where Dublin and Cork were the great prizes for an invader. Martello Towers were built around Dublin Bay even before those in England. Despite the fact that a French attack on Dublin from the sea was felt to be the least likely of the threats, the positions of fourteen towers had been selected by the middle of 1804, a contractor appointed and building complete by 1805. Lord Cornwallis, who gave up the post of master-general of the Ordnance in 1801, privately thought that the Irish towers were ‘totally useless’.125 After much debate, shaped by the invasion scares of 1796 and 1797, the west of Ireland was seen to be the most vulnerable. For hardened French troops, Dublin would have been only a week’s march away, and the use by the French of the Grand Canal from the Shannon to Dublin could have shortened that time. Between 1804 and 1806, and then again from 1811 to 1814, batteries and towers were constructed along the line of the Shannon. As in England, the local reservists were trained to assist the artillerymen in working the guns.126 At Shannonbridge, the nearest point to Galway Bay, work started on earthwork defences in 1804, and these developed into some of the most sophisticated fortifications of the age.127 Barracks multiplied late in the war for troops garrisoned for internal security. From 1807 Martello Towers were built at the anchorages where the French might land, at Bantry, Galway, Lough Swilly and Lough Foyle.128 The building of these extensive works continued until the end of the war, demonstrating that the fear of a large-scale French landing in the west of Ireland was still central to the defensive thinking of the British government until at least 1812.129

  Altogether in the British Isles, including the two in Orkney, a total of 168 Martello Towers, of differing designs and materials, were built during the Napoleonic War. More were projected: at one point in 1804 a circular went out to district commanders to report any further sit
es that might be appropriate.130 There were mistakes, and some, particularly on the Kent coast, were built too near each other, so that fire from their cannons would have badly overlapped. Opinion on their likely effectiveness in the event of invasion remained a matter of debate. Some thirty years after the wars, the duke of Wellington reflected: ‘At all events, if they are nothing else, each of them is an excellent defensive guardhouse, which cannot be surprised and may be defended forever against anything but a regular attack by a superior force.’131

  The effect that defensive preparations undertaken by Britain, from the arming the auxiliary forces to the building of fortifications, had on Napoleon’s resolve to invade can only be surmised. He would have had to take into account the damage inflicted by the Royal Navy on his invasion craft and subsequently on French supply vessels. But a dozen years of unremitting military engineering from 1803 to 1815 unquestionably made the British Isles safer, and, as every year passed, an invasion therefore became a greater risk for the French. Even so, the threat posed by Napoleon from 1807 until midway through 1812, whether from his newly building fleet at Antwerp and other Continental ports under his control, or from an expedition to the west of Ireland, was still very much in the minds of military planners. As late as 1 January 1811 a 253-page Defence Report was drawn up whose authors were quite certain of Napoleon’s intention to invade: ‘These considerations must be too strong upon the mind of every reflecting Man and the disasters of successful Invasion too evident to need any illustration … irresistible evidence from long experience that till Invasion has been attempted He will never be at rest.’ The report proposed the need for 400,000 British militiamen in 800 battalions. Napoleon’s army of only ‘60 or 70,000 men could never [even] subjugate the Country … nothing short of five times the number … could hold a probability of even temporary success.’132