Britain Against Napoleon

by Roger Knight

  The importance of intelligence can be gauged by the impact that it had on policy. Good information was available on Napoleon’s intentions in the weeks before the operation against Copenhagen in September 1807, as we saw in Chapter 7. But the assessments on the war-readiness of the Danes, taken earlier in the year, were largely unsound. For some time, as Napoleon tightened his hold on northern Europe, the British government had watched with trepidation his advance towards the Baltic: if France acquired the Danish Fleet, the strategic naval balance in home waters would swing back towards the emperor, while French control of the Sound would imperil the import of timber, tar and hemp from the Baltic ports, products upon which naval power and mercantile strength depended.

  George Canning, who took over as foreign secretary on 25 March 1807, had been inclined to give the Danes the benefit of the doubt, but, as spring passed into early summer, an impression was gained, based largely on flawed intelligence, of the hostility of the Danish government.† Lieutenant-General the earl of Pembroke, recently appointed on a special mission to Austria, was forced to take a northerly route to Vienna by French conquests and took a walk through Copenhagen dockyard. Although he knew nothing about ships and navies, he became convinced that the activity of Danish shipwrights indicated a mobilization, reckoning, as he wrote to Canning that night, that at least twenty Danish ships of the line ‘were fit to go to sea with all their stores, etc., named and numbered’. Canning received the letter on 8 June. The British minister plenipotentiary in Copenhagen, Benjamin Garlike, had reported nothing to London, for the simple reason that there had been no unusual Danish activity. Canning, however, was intent on finding evidence of what he wanted to believe, and distrusted Garlike for his closeness to the previous government. He chose to blame Garlike for laxness, relieved him of his post and transferred him to Prussia. Tom Grenville, out of office and on holiday in Wales, received the news from Garlike and wrote to his brother: ‘they have moved him from Copenhagen almost in disgrace to Memel because he would not write them word that the Danes were making hostile preparations at Copenhagen. He protests to me in his vindication that not the slightest preparation has been made by them.’* Grenville added in his letter to his brother Buckingham: ‘They are really the shabbiest set of dirty politicians that was ever seen.’60

  Then, on 14 June, Napoleon defeated a much larger Russian force at Friedland and brough Alexander I into formal alliance with France by the Treaty of Tilsit, signed on a raft in the middle of the River Nieman on 7 July, but Canning had already become convinced that pre-emptive action was needed. Alexander Cockburn, the British consul in Tonningen in Denmark, sent a message in the first week of July to the effect that France had already received permission from the Danes to occupy Holstein and that French troops were soon to be expected. This turned out to be inaccurate, though there was plenty of reason to think that it might have been the case. Nevertheless, it was a significant contribution to the cabinet’s growing conviction, led by Canning, that force was required against Copenhagen. By 13 July it had decided that a strong fleet should go to the Sound; by 16 July Admiral Gambier had been appointed; and by the next day a letter had been sent from the cabinet to the king requesting the use of a conjoint force.61 However, Castlereagh’s secret instructions to Admiral Gambier stated the core of the government’s position:

  the maritime power, position and resources of Denmark may shortly be made the instrument in the hands of France not only of excluding our commerce from the Baltic and of depriving us of the means of naval equipment, but also of multiplying the points from which an invasion of His Majesty’s dominions may be attempted under the protection of a formidable naval force.62

  A fleet of seventeen British ships of the line, accompanied by twenty-one frigates and smaller vessels, under the command of Admiral Gambier, and 400 transports with troops sailed from the Yarmouth Roads for Copenhagen on 26 July. Less than six weeks after Napoleon’s victory at Friedland, British counter-measures were under way. On 7 September 1807 Copenhagen capitulated and surrendered seventeen Danish ships of the line, only seven weeks after the cabinet in London had taken the decision to act.63

  The speed of these events in the days of sail, when men could travel no faster than a galloping horse or a ship with a fresh breeze behind it, was truly impressive. The pace was certainly too fast for Napoleon. (It is perhaps no coincidence that all this diplomatic and military action took place beyond the limits of the French telegraph system reaching out from Paris.) Rapid mobilization by the British was possible because a fleet was gathered at Yarmouth, made ready by the previous government; 8,000 British troops, the King’s German Legion, were already in the Baltic on the island of Rügen trying to relieve the fortress of Stralsund in Pomerania, the last Swedish stronghold on the southern shores of the Baltic, which was besieged by the French; and a further 16,500 were ready in Britain. Troops were needed because the Danes had strengthened their coastal defences since the previous Battle of Copenhagen in 1801, and a British Fleet could not now get near enough the city to bombard it.

  This operation was not, however, free of further intelligence quandaries. On 21 July, the day on which the government finally decided to attack Denmark, Canning received a letter from the comte d’Antraigues, writing from his home near Richmond. The French royalist claimed that he had information from a senior Russian officer, Prince Troubetskoi, who was present at the negotiations at Tilsit, that Napoleon had secretly proposed a maritime league of France and Russia, hostile to Britain; and, while the tsar did not respond to this proposal, neither did he demur. If true, it would provide every justification needed for the decisive military action that the cabinet had just decided to take. The question was whether it was in fact true; or whether it was simply a move by d’Antraigues to secure himself a British pension.64*

  This intelligence was utilized in the furious parliamentary debates that followed rather than during military planning. In early 1808 the Opposition attacked the government for its pre-emptive strike on Copenhagen and the consequent opprobrium that it had aroused abroad. To this, Canning stated that he had positive information of the hostile intentions of France, Russia and Denmark, though, in order to protect his sources, he was unable to give further details. (A rumour that a British officer was hiding under the table on the raft at Tilsit when the treaty was signed helped the government’s case.) The Opposition could do nothing, as Canning’s oratory was masterly, and by this time Russia, in any case, had declared war on Britain. Reaction outside parliament was broadly in support of the government. Even Tom Grenville had to admit privately in a letter to his brother, Lord Grenville, that, had the previous government been in power, they would probably have done the same.65

  Further justification for the Copenhagen operation came from Napoleon’s aggressive actions on the southern fringes of Europe. With the British navy still engaged at Copenhagen, the emperor sent an ultimatum to Lisbon demanding that Portugal should close its ports to Britain and declare war on its old ally, and sent an army south through Spain to reinforce his orders. Canning received the despatch while he was waiting for news from Copenhagen. ‘Never was a time of so much anxiety,’ he wrote to his wife.66 He came to an agreement with the Portuguese ambassador in London, guaranteeing the safety of the royal family if they would withdraw to Brazil, with British naval and military help.

  Yet still the British government worried about the threat of invasion. The source of the danger was the new French Fleet under construction in the dockyard at Antwerp. After the breathing space afforded by Napoleon’s campaigns in eastern Europe which ended with the Treaty of Tilsit, British concern centred less on an invasion of the south coast, the perceived danger point in 1804 and 1805, than on the north and east coasts, and, as ever, on Irish shores. Exactly how much of a danger was posed by Napoleon’s warship building at Antwerp, combined with the output of other dockyards under his control across Europe, has long been a cause for debate.* What is not disputed is that the scale of the emperor’s na
val ambition was such that British ministers had to take the threat seriously. Intelligence sources from Antwerp and Flushing included smugglers, pilots, special agents, a Swedish spy and an American, all corroborating significant amounts of naval activity. In late 1807 one British assessment reckoned that twenty ships of the line could be on the stocks in Antwerp, ‘and the resources for building from the Black Forest through the Rhine inexhaustible’.67 But there were always well-founded doubts that Napoleon could raise enough skilled seamen to man his completed ships effectively.68

  Understanding the potential threat of the new dockyard at Antwerp was simple; what use the workforce was making of the extensive facilities was much more difficult. We now know that those ships that were built were constructed of green timbers, so that they would not have had a long life, but, even so, sixty-two French ships of the line and fifty-nine smaller rates were built in all French dockyards between 1803 and 1815.69 The total workforce in Antwerp and other dockyards under French control peaked in 1807 at 24,000.* This total did not include the workforce in more distant dockyards under French control, such as Venice.70 At its height, 4,000 artificers were working at Antwerp, among them shipyard workers from those countries that Napoleon had overrun: Italians, Dutchmen, Spaniards, Germans and even, by the end, Poles.71 A further complication in estimating the threat was that every French naval establishment had a large complement of French convicts: Brest, for instance, averaged 3,000 through these years.72 How much effective work they achieved could be no more than surmise.

  It was, however, the weight of this intelligence that led to the disastrous decision to send the large expedition to take and destroy Antwerp in 1809 (see Chapter 7). Lord Castlereagh, the secretary of state for war, drove the measure through a divided and essentially leaderless cabinet, for the prime minister, the duke of Portland, was by this time very ill. On 21–22 May 1809 a rare check of Napoleon by the Austrians at Aspern–Essling, and the consequent optimism, enabled Castlereagh to persuade the cabinet into action in order to help Austria. Later, in the Commons, Castlereagh said of the decision to send the expedition that the Austrian victory ‘had a preponderating influence with His Majesty’s Government in the consideration of that question’.73

  An array of intelligence had been gathered from army and naval sources for two years before the expedition sailed to the Scheldt. The tidal conditions, leading marks, possible landing places and anchorages were all known, as was the fact that sailing within the river, four miles wide at its widest point, brought ships within the range of enemy artillery on both banks. Information was also held on the number of regular and irregular French troops in Flushing; and how many were suffering from marsh fever and the state of the ships building there and those ready in the basin. Lord Mulgrave, first lord of the Admiralty, supported Castlereagh. But his minute to the cabinet of 25 March focused on the strategic necessity of striking at Antwerp, rather than the likelihood of success, and it demonstrated how much the threat of invasion was on his mind:

  the Scheld[t] Fleet is within a short distance of the vulnerable parts of the coast of England and conveniently situated for taking advantage of a leading wind that the British fleet in the Baltic would be exposed to an attack from the Scheld[t] and the existence of a strong fleet there would place in jeopardy all our Blockading Squadrons from Brest to Toulon …74

  Senior army officers were virtually unanimously pessimistic on the prospects for the expedition. Such a weight of opinion from Lieutenant-Colonel James Gordon, General Sir John Hope, Lieutenant-General Robert Brownrigg and Major General Sir Harry Calvert should have been heeded, but Castlereagh ignored them. General Sir David Dundas, who had served in Antwerp in 1794, wrote to warn him that ‘whatever way Antwerp is to be approached or taken, the service is one of very great risk, and in which the safe return of the Army so employed may be very precarious’.75

  The cabinet, however, grasped at intelligence of a more encouraging nature. Several reports corroborated poor morale among the crews of the French ships blockaded in the Scheldt. An intercepted despatch of 7 December 1808 to Napoleon from Denis Decrès, the French minister of marine, contained an assessment of the possibility of keeping ships in the Scheldt, and of the expense of arming them and disarming them; he proposed laying them up for the winter, and sending all the crews to Toulon.76 In late June intelligence was received that all troops and carpenters at Antwerp had been ordered to join the Grand Army.77 No one considered the possibility of a rapid movement of troops to the area by Napoleon, swiftly brought about by his telegraph communications network from Paris, as well as the withdrawal of Austria from the war. The whole decision-making process demonstrated the way that politicians can shoulder aside intelligence when it gets in the way of the action they really intend to take.78

  Yet, in spite of the major setback at Walcheren, by the spring of 1811 British intelligence had accurately begun to identify a plummeting in the morale of the French Navy, linked to reports of shortages of manpower. General Don in Jersey forwarded a report in May that 80,000 French naval conscripts were to be taken for limited service in Spain. Lack of naval manpower in Flushing was confirmed by observations of Admiral Young off the Scheldt on the state of the blockaded ships.79 Young reported to Yorke in April a casual conversation between the master of the Resolution and a Dutch fishing boat on the mutinous state of the many nations that made up Napoleon’s crews in Antwerp: ‘There was nothing the crews of the French ships wished for as to go to sea, as they would certainly bring the ships to England.’80 By early May, Young’s judgement was firmer and more confident: ‘From the apparent state of the ships there … and from the disaffected state of their crews … I should think it quite impossible for them to venture to put to sea.’ And he added, ‘in their present state, five [British] sail will as effectively blockade the Port, as five and twenty.’81 By June, Young had obtained economic intelligence of interest: escaped prisoners had passed troops near Metz who were experiencing difficulties in obtaining supplies, as ‘all Government Bills on Paris having lately been return’d protested … what was procured was by requisition and force.’82 By September he reported that French troops had been marched away from all parts of the coast. This was intelligence of real significance, indicating some serious weaknesses in French manpower and financial resources. Other messages coming out of France, however, indicated a continuing threat. In the autumn of 1811, credible information was provided for Charles Philip Yorke at the Admiralty that the French were planning an attack on the north of England from Antwerp, to which he attached some importance.83 The government would not be able to lower its guard for at least another year.

  Looking back now, it is apparent that the output of all the French dockyards began to fall sharply from 1811, through lack of money and because of the drafting of shipwrights and other workers into the army – dockyard companies fought at Wagram in 1809 and Dresden in 1813. The emperor’s demands were becoming increasingly unrealistic. In January 1813 he ordered his navy minister to set his budgets to ensure that 104 new ships would be launched from French dockyards by 1815: eleven should be launched between March and June 1814 with the remainder the following year. The minister replied that he had ‘fourteen ships on the stocks at Antwerp’. Napoleon made no attempt to understand why so little had been done, merely remarking to Decrès that ‘You had reported much more work than you have done.’84 A dictator had simply been told what he wanted to hear. The reality was that from 1812 to the end of the war only four ships of the line and five frigates were launched in all French dockyards. Numbers of workers and morale declined and sickness increased, as Napoleon stripped the yards of two thirds of their manpower to fight in the desperate defensive land battles in the last two years of the war.85 As with other dictators in their final days, the gap between aspiration and capacity was enormous and the orders issued by the falling figure at the regime’s centre, fantastical.

  The threat posed by the potential capability of Antwerp perplexed the British governmen
t to the end. What was not clear at the time was that manpower was the problem vexing France. If the French had had the men, Antwerp had the capacity to build a force to threaten Britain. When peace terms were being negotiated in 1814, the British naval commissioner, Captain Thomas Byam Martin, was sent to inspect the city. He found that the newly constructed basins were large enough to hold forty-eight ships of the line and he reported to Castlereagh that the docks, slips and warehouses were of ‘an extent of which we had no conception’.86 The eye of a professional seaman, given the freedom finally to survey the dockyard facilities, understood the state of affairs all too well.

  11

  Government Scandal and Reform 1803–1812

  Since I came into office I have proceeded on all questions of augmentation of salaries, on a strong impression of the importance of public economy … I am aware that I have created much dissatisfaction by holding the public purse strings so close: but it is from an apprehension that without very rigid economy we can neither retain the goodwill of the public, nor hold out against the perseverance and resources of the enemy.

  – Lord Mulgrave, first lord of the Admiralty, 1807–1810, to George Rose, treasurer of the navy, 4 February 18091

  Our general opinion, indeed, on the conduct of Ordnance business, is that it is on the whole efficiently carried on; but that it is often executed on too great a scale, and without that attention to economy, which a due consideration of the large and unavoidable Expenses of the Nation imperiously demands.