Britain Against Napoleon

by Roger Knight

  The primary purpose of the Commission of Military Enquiry’s reports was to establish regulations and order, and it did this with a will. Not only were accounting forms and procedures specified, but detailed rules for matters such as cleanliness and order were laid down. Henceforth, for instance, all women were to be banned from barracks. However, the commission’s examinations during the compilation of the Third Report, on the ‘Stores and Services of the Barrack Master-General’, led to the exposure of irregular financial dealings and claimed the first political scalp. Alexander Davison, the chief contractor to the department, had supplied vast quantities of equipment, not by contract but merely through an understanding contained in an exchange of letters with De Lancey over Christmas 1794. A long investigation of discrepancies was led by J. C. Herries (of whom we shall hear more shortly), a young Treasury official and protégé of Spencer Perceval. It transpired that Davison had caused receipts to be forged and had also charged commission on items that he already had in his store. In December 1808 Davison was sentenced by Lord Ellenborough, the lord chief justice, at a court in Westminster Hall on thirty-six counts of defrauding the king. Apart from having to pay back a great deal of money to the government, Davison was sentenced to twenty-one months in Newgate Prison. It was a spectacular fall from grace, accompanied by a stream of hostile comment in the newspapers.80

  This was a high-profile case, for Davison had flaunted his wealth, keeping a house in St James’s Square, where he was, as it happened, a near-neighbour of Lord Ellenborough. Davison was well known for having been the prize agent of Lord Nelson and for having had medals struck for those officers and seamen who had fought in Nelson’s victories. He had many friends in government: his character witnesses included Sir Evan Nepean and Sir Andrew Snape Hamond, as well as General Lord Moira, who had recently been master-general of the Ordnance during the Ministry of All the Talents; to Moira’s embarrassment, he had only two years previously appointed Davison to the post of treasurer of the Ordnance. For the Portland government this successful prosecution of a previous Whig junior minister afforded a useful political advantage.*

  Davison was not the last to be exposed. The military commissioners used their military, financial and legal expertise to great effect: no politician could have struck a shrewder blow to popularize and legitimize their task. This was a commission to be feared by soldiers and politicians alike. The Ninth Report, which looked into the administration of the West Indies army contracts and pay, could not have been more critical, for it found widespread corruption and recommended the indictment of several individuals: ‘This evil has doubtless been of great magnitude, widely extended and deeply rooted.’81 So effective was the commission that – after they had finished nineteen reports on the army and the Ordnance – five of its members were retained during 1812 to investigate the Office of Works, which maintained government buildings. The examination of the senior works officials took several weeks, the commissioners questioning each of them, under oath, for four hours at a time, over four successive days. They uncovered a complicated mess, spectacular overspending and ineffectual management. Soon after the presentation of the report to the Treasury, one of the commissioners, Colonel Benjamin Stephenson, was appointed surveyor-general of the King’s Works, and brought about rapid changes in personnel and financial discipline in the department.82

  As with the Admiralty, complications ensued at the War Office as a result of the publication of the Commission of Military Enquiry reports. It was decided that the secretary at war was accountable to the Treasury, which clarified many years of confused lines of responsibility. But perhaps the most interesting and effective measure was the appointment of an apolitical military undersecretary, in conscious imitation of Harrison’s position at the Treasury. The post had been created by the Whigs in 1806, and filled by political appointees, but when Robert Dundas, Lord Melville’s son, was in line to be given the job of secretary of state for war by Perceval in 1809, he expressed the wish to make an important change: ‘Mr Dundas is further desirous that professional merit alone should influence the selection of an officer to fill this situation, and, when placed in it, that he should in no manner intermix in politics, or be a member of the House of Commons.’83

  The candidate who came to fit the bill was Colonel Henry Bunbury, a tactful and conscientious administrator, only thirty-one years old, who had recently distinguished himself as quartermaster-general in the Mediterranean. His name had been put forward by generals Dundas, Brownrigg and Alexander Hope. When first offered the post, Bunbury was suspicious of its non-political nature, as he came from a strong Whig family and was due to receive a substantial inheritance that might have been imperilled by accepting office in a Tory administration. Only after an agonized correspondence with Hope and Brownrigg, and a written assurance that he would not have to take any part in politics, did he accept. In the event, it was Lord Liverpool who was made secretary of state for war, and who assured Bunbury that the undersecretaryship was ‘purely military, entirely abstracted from all politics’.84 The success of this appointment could be measured not only by the improvements brought about by Bunbury in his tenure of the office, which lasted until the end of the war, but also by his participation in a powerful cross-departmental committee advising on the supply of Wellington’s army in the Peninsula, the other members being Colonel Willoughby Gordon, commissary-in-chief, and George Harrison. These able, young administrators solved the communication problem across departments and brought military experience and specialist knowledge, rather than politics, to this vital task.

  However, the principal weakness uncovered by the Commission of Military Enquiry, as by the Commission of Naval Revision, was the unaudited accounts. With the press of war business taking precedence, examining and passing paymasters’ and contractors’ accounts had never been given priority. Though delay was endemic across all government spending departments, the War Office was the most dilatory. It presented the most difficult of tasks because of the dispersed nature of the army – with infantry and cavalry, and regular, militia and volunteer regiments, many of them at sometime having served overseas, and a plethora of contractors and agents supplying them. In 1801, only 460 of 9,546 accounts for the period 1798 to 1800 had been examined. In 1807, another parliamentary committee, that on Public Expenditure, was told that the paymaster-general’s account for 1782 would be completed by Christmas 1807, while ‘not one account of any Paymaster-General [had] been finally declared, nor made ready for declaration’ in the past ten years.85 When the young Lord Palmerston came to the office of secretary at war in October 1809, some 40,000 regimental accounts were in arrears, stretching back to 1783.

  The clerical staff of the War Office had been expanded several times in an attempt to deal with the problem but had made little impression. The Commission of Military Enquiry put its finger on one problem when it highlighted the short working day, which was from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., and the War Office’s hours were immediately lengthened.86 After 1809 Palmerston as secretary at war put in hand a reorganization, and the Treasury sanctioned some expansion, increasing his staff to 144. The Commissary-in-Chief’s Department had taken over the task of supplying the army in the Peninsula, and much remained to be sorted out between the new organization and the War Office.

  Palmerston worked hard and expected the same from his subordinates. Improvements came slowly but money began to be saved.87 Palmerston’s zeal for reform led to difficult relations between the War Office and General Dundas, the temporary commander-in-chief, now very old and irritable, in the Horse Guards; both the prime minister and the prince regent were drawn in to arbitrate between these two very strong characters, even though there was a fifty-year difference in their ages. It took several years before the disagreements were resolved. Although the origins of this prolonged altercation were trivial, it did give rise to the question of whether the secretary at war had the right to demand financial information from the army.88*

  As the system of accounts beca
me more rigorous and transparent, cases of embezzlement came to light. Perhaps the greatest villain to be flushed out was Joseph Hunt, who had been a commissioner on the boards of the Victualling, Transport and Ordnance departments, and latterly also MP for Queenborough. After his chicanery was exposed by the Commission of Military Enquiry, he resigned in January 1810 and fled to Portugal, with £93,000 of public balances in his possession. The Ordnance Department seized Hunt’s house in south-east London, and he died in France in 1816. In another case, William Chinnery, a senior clerk in the Treasury, was found to have had almost £79,000 paid to him to defray official expenses in his capacity as a colonial agent.89 The well-connected George Villiers, courtier and personal friend of the king as well as the paymaster of marines for many years, was the next to be caught, this time by the young John Wilson Croker, only a month into his appointment as secretary to the Admiralty in October 1809. Croker recalled many years later that, having paid ‘a more minute attention to details than my two predecessors had happened to do, I saw reason to suspect a serious defalcation … and refused my signature to an additional issue of money till the last issues were accounted for’. Villiers exercised all the influence he could, ‘pressed his royal patron to stifle my capricious opposition … all that was to be done to set all right was that I should sign the same routine order that my predecessors had always signed.’90 Croker had to go so far as to offer his resignation to the prime minister, Spencer Perceval, rather than sign the order, and eventually he won the day. Villiers had indeed had something to hide. In January 1810 Perceval informed an astounded George III that Villiers’s embezzlements up to 1804 amounted to £280,000. Further, his sureties of £10,000, lodged when he took office in 1792, had disappeared. The government seized the disgraced Villiers’s house and estate; but as late as 1819 he still owed the government £220,000.91 Croker’s stand was significant, though one suspects he was fully aware of the extent of Villiers’s situation before he made it.

  A hardening of attitudes towards corruption and an intolerance of slackness throughout the departments were steadily developing, put more and more into relief through stricter systems and accounting. When, for instance, it was found in 1808 in the Victualling Office that the accountant for cash and all ten clerks in his department had been accepting presents from contractors, the Admiralty called in ‘Mr Reed, Chief Magistrate of the Police Force’: everyone involved was dismissed, though the press of business demanded that six of the junior clerks be reinstated.92 The profound change of attitudes can perhaps be gauged by a small incident at Christmas 1812, when four of the Victualling Office messengers accepted a Christmas box of £5 each from a contractor. The Victualling Board minutes record: ‘The Board highly reprobates such gross improprieties of conduct, entertained serious thoughts of instantly dismissing them altogether from the service of the Office.’ Eventually the messengers were pardoned, their defence being that they did not think that Christmas boxes came within the strictures on taking fees and gratuities. Nevertheless, the Board fined the messengers £2 each.93*

  This cultural shift was brought about in part by some radical changes of senior personnel. As a result of the reports by the two commissions, a good many senior officials in the administration of the navy and the army lost their jobs. This process was initially accelerated by the changes of government in 1806 and 1807, which brought about a rapid turnover of parliamentary government posts. When the Ministry of All the Talents came into power for thirteen months in early 1806, Lord Grenville needed as many offices in his gift as possible, for his coalition needed to reward not only his own followers, but also those of Fox and of Addington.94 At least forty posts changed hands. Not only were all cabinet members replaced, but, unusually, every one of the five Treasury commissioners and six of the seven around the Admiralty Board table. All officeholders who were also MPs were changed, not only undersecretaries but also much more junior posts such as the clerk of the Ordnance, principal storekeeper and clerk of the deliveries. Furthermore, when the Tories returned to power under the duke of Portland thirteen months later, in March 1807, the posts changed hands yet again, and in only a minority of cases was the original Tory incumbent reinstated, with the exception of the junior Ordnance posts. Thus changes of administration effectively changed the incumbents of nearly forty posts twice over in quick succession. Moreover, following the formation of the Portland government, ministers and undersecretaries were significantly younger, and subsequently more able to take the strain of long hours of administration and negotiation than the older men they had replaced.

  William Marsden, secretary of the Admiralty, was the sole senior civil servant to remain in office when the Ministry of All the Talents came to power. He was the only undersecretary who had resisted going into the House.

  not only because I felt that I did not possess the talent necessary for distinguishing myself in a deliberative and popular assembly, where eloquence is the first and judgement the second requisite, but because I was satisfied of its being inconsistent with the effective discharge of my official duties in time of war, which required all my time and attention.95

  This was a rational view, but it left the government without an MP in possession of authoritative and detailed naval knowledge. The Naval Estimates therefore had to be presented in the Commons by a member of the Board, Sir Philip Stephens, who had long been in Admiralty service as secretary. By this time over eighty, he had survived all the changes because he had the support of the king. Stephens finally retired in 1806 and Marsden in 1807.

  At this point, the distinction between the political nature of the first secretary, appointed by the prime minister rather than by the Board, and the permanent official, then known as the second secretary, was formalized, just as it had been in the Treasury some years before. The new Tory secretary of the Admiralty was another Irishman, William Wellesley-Pole, a brother of the future duke of Wellington: he was forty-four and a highly competent parliamentary performer. One of the Board commissioners commented on Wellesley-Pole’s ‘energy and knowledge of business … [he] has done more for the Board in three weeks than ten years had done.’96 He was followed in 1809 by a third Irishman, the 29-year-old John Wilson Croker, a Tory appointment whose tenure in office as secretary lasted for twenty-one years. His quick wit and forceful personality immediately established dominance over the Board. Croker described himself as the ‘servant of the Board’, but it was wryly observed by Charles Philip Yorke, first lord between 1810 and 1812, that ‘it was precisely the other way round’.97

  Two very young talents, both destined to rise to be prime minister, came into junior government posts in this period: Lord Palmerston was appointed in 1809 as secretary at war at the age of twenty-five.* No post in government required more drudgery or was more liable to make the young politician unpopular, especially among disappointed army officers. But it suited Palmerston. A week after he joined the office, he wrote to a friend: ‘I continue to like this office very much.’98 He stayed in it for nineteen years. A year later, at only twenty-two, Robert Peel was appointed undersecretary for war and the colonies by Spencer Perceval and immediately demonstrated a precocious debating talent.99 Another able young man, Henry Goulburn, was brought on by Perceval and followed Peel in this office in his mid-twenties, the start of another distinguished career.

  Unprecedented change was also in hand for those lower down the hierarchy. In May 1805 Lord Barham had written to William Pitt, ‘Our naval boards are in such a weak state, that they cannot be relied upon for either advice or execution.’100 Over the next three years, five out of the seven Navy Board commissioners were changed and five were ejected from the Victualling Board. The comptroller of the navy, Sir Andrew Snape Hamond, now sixty-eight, had written to Lord Barham in January 1806 of his ‘long and painful illness’ and expressed his intention to retire before he resigned when the Talents ministry came to power in February 1806.101 Appointed in his stead was Captain Thomas Boulden Thompson, aged forty, a much admired officer, ‘a so
lid, steady, good kind of man’, who had lost his leg in 1801 at the Battle of Copenhagen.102 One naval officer on the Navy Board was moved to be resident commissioner at Chatham, and another in his seventies was retired, as was old Sir John Henslow, the surveyor of the navy, who had come to the Navy Office as assistant surveyor as far back as 1771. It was in 1804 that the most distinguished dockyard shipwright of the first half of the nineteenth century was given his first significant promotion. Robert Seppings was made master shipwright of Chatham yard at the exceptionally young age of thirty-seven: nine years later he had risen to be surveyor of the navy.

  Lord Mulgrave, Tory first lord between 1807 and 1810, in spite of his initial hesitation over the findings of the Commission of Naval Revision, steadily implemented their recommendations.* In the opinion of John Barrow, who was able to observe him closely, Mulgrave ‘possessed wit and humour in a considerable degree, and was always most agreeable at his own table; he was also an acute critic.’103 (Captain Sir Andrew Snape Hamond, who, after retirement, was disappointed in his request to be appointed to flag rank, referred to Mulgrave’s ‘hasty and petulant disposition’.104) One way or another, Mulgrave was not a man to be trifled with: he continued to make changes in the navy in the same manner as the Whigs, but more brutally. In a single day, 3 December 1808, he either moved or forced five old or sick administrators to resign from the Navy and Victualling boards, all to be replaced by much younger men. The honest but ineffectual John Marsh, the chairman of the Victualling Board, was called in to see Mulgrave on 14 October 1808, when he was told, as he noted, ‘to my great surprise’ that, after forty years’ service, he would be retired on three quarters of his salary.105 Other casualties included William Budge, previously private secretary to Lord Melville, who had severe gout, and Robert Sadleir Moody, who had served in the Victualling Office for fifty years.106 On the same day Samuel Bentham was appointed to the Navy Board as ‘Civil Architect and Engineer’. Presumably Mulgrave implemented these new and controversial measures simultaneously to give them maximum political impact.