Britain Against Napoleon

by Roger Knight

  The historical headlines have been usurped by Napoleon and Wellington, the drama of Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna. The foundations of military victory, though, lay in the industrial capacity of cannon-founders, the expertise of gunsmiths in their machine shops, the diligence of shipbuilders and the makers of ropes, uniforms, gun-carriages and gunpowder, the hard work of those who toiled in the increasingly efficient agricultural sector, the merchant seamen whose ships transported vital stores and food, and the crews of packet ships who provided the means of communication throughout the year. In turn, none of this could have been achieved without the men who signed and passed contracts across tables in government departments, the civil servants who drafted documents and did sums in the backrooms and basements of Whitehall, and the international merchants and dealers who traded in the City. They were all needed as much as the tens of thousands of young soldiers and seamen who resisted, survived and finally overcame the threat from Napoleon.

  Aftermath

  I am by no means sure that the total destruction of the Emperor Napoleon and his army would be of such benefit to the world; his succession would not fall to Russia or any other continental power, but to that which commands the sea, and whose domination would then be intolerable.

  – General Kutuzov, commander-in-chief of the Russian Army, to Colonel Sir Robert Wilson, British combat commissioner to the Allied Armies, when in pursuit of the French Army from Moscow, December 18121

  After Waterloo, Britain’s military and diplomatic prestige was at a height reached neither before nor since. France was humiliated, occupied by hundreds of thousands of foreign troops, for whose food and accommodation the French government had to pay. The second Treaty of Paris of 20 November 1815 took France back to her 1790 frontiers. Savoy and several frontier fortresses were given up. An indemnity of 700 million francs was added to the costs of the occupying armies. The art treasures that the French had seized during the wars were repatriated: 3,000 statues and more than 2,000 paintings were returned to their former owners. The restored Bourbons were to be fatally weakened by association with this array of failures.2

  The British armed forces that had contributed to the victory had suffered severe cuts long before the fighting ceased. At what was otherwise a moment for great satisfaction, the backbenchers in parliament, as usual worried about the size of the national debt, asserted themselves and rebelled when the Army Estimates went before the House in 1816. The government was forced to abolish the property tax, which immediately reduced revenue by 20 per cent.3 This was the start of a process that eventually led to a shrinking of the role of the state in the economy during the Victorian period, the years of ‘laissez-faire’ government.4

  Reductions occurred first in the navy. Warships manned and in commission were cut in 1818 to a sixth of the total in 1814. Warships in commission fell from 713 in 1814 to 121 in 1818. The number of seamen ‘borne’ dropped by almost half, from a peak of 147,000 in 1813 to just under 79,000 by the end of 1815, a figure that was to fall much further in subsequent years.5 By 1817 nearly 90 per cent of commissioned naval officers were unemployed and on ‘half-pay’. For some, the employment situation hardly improved, which led to widespread suffering. A well-known cartoon of 1825, A Mid on Half-Pay, shows a haggard man blacking boots in the street, his midshipman’s dirk lying broken in front of him.6 But Britain had ended the war with over 600,000 tons of large warships, a figure that equalled the combined totals of France, Russia, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal and the United States.7 It was ironic that this tonnage was kept largely in reserve; yet the threat of commissioning it over the next forty years, until the advent of the steam warship, gave Britain its pre-eminent position in the world. It was a further irony that the prestige of the navy was not high in 1815, for it had played only a supporting, though vital, role in the last years of the war; this had brought it little glory, in contrast to the period up to the Battle of Trafalgar. Its reputation was not helped by courts martial after the Battle of the Aix Roads in 1809, a squabble between naval officers Admiral Gambier and Captain Thomas Cochrane. Cochrane did his service no favours when he was gaoled for a year in 1814 when found guilty of a stock-market scam.

  On the other hand, the prestige of the army was high, not only because of its performance in the Peninsula and at Waterloo, but because of admiration for sacrifices made when success was elusive. Some regiments had suffered sickening losses, both on the Continent and overseas. Two examples can be taken from a long list. The Green Howards served from 1797 to 1819 in Ceylon, where nearly 1,500 had died, a loss of over 7.5 per cent a year from its established strength of 870 men.8 At the failed assault on Bergen-op-Zoom in March 1814, two major generals and a brigadier were killed, and casualties were a startling 76 per cent of the force of 4,000 men.9 After 1815 the government kept army numbers higher, and soldiers were discharged at a slower rate than the navy, from 240,000 soldiers in 1815 to 103,000 in 1828.* The militia ballots were ended by the Whig government in 1831; until then Tory governments had been cautious about reducing the means of tackling social disorder.10

  The Central London offices of the navy and army quickly lost between 20 and 30 per cent of their staff. The Transport Office was abolished in 1817, with the pre-1794 arrangement re-established by returning responsibilities for chartering transports to the Navy Office. Within the army, the Barrack Office and Storekeeper-General’s Office disappeared, their functions taken over by the Ordnance Department.11 The post of commissary-in-chief was likewise abolished. By 1832 the Navy Office itself had been abolished by the Whig government, bringing all aspects of the administration of the navy under the Board of Admiralty. But most of the habits of sound administration established during the wars endured.

  The country itself experienced prolonged economic disruption and destitution. Demobilized soldiers and seamen went home to find a much reduced labour market. Government contracts for shipbuilding, cannon and small arms ceased. Victualling contracts shrank dramatically, and lack of demand for naval and military provisions was instrumental in bringing down agricultural prices. The Midlands armaments industry was hit very hard, and the government tried to alleviate hardship there by the Poor Employment Act of 1817, which enabled funding to be advanced to public-works schemes such as canals, bridges and roads.12 However, it was not effective, and serious violence soon broke out. In December 1816 in London a drunken meeting at Spa Fields in the City ended in an armed attack on the Tower. The ‘Blanketeers’, out-of-work weavers carrying blankets, marched from Manchester on London but were dispersed. Textile workers in Derbyshire rioted: three were executed and thirty transported. By far the worst, and best remembered, was the very large meeting at St Peter’s Fields in Manchester in 1819, which came to hear the radical Henry Hunt speak on the need for universal suffrage and annual parliaments. Both regular army and volunteers were used to disperse the crowd on the orders of the magistrates. Eleven civilians were killed and 400 injured; it became known as the Peterloo Massacre.13 The movement for parliamentary reform had stayed in the background during the war, but once the war was over it came to the fore and, in combination with the friction over the protectionist Corn Laws and the argument about Catholic Emancipation, set the political agenda for the 1820s, culminating in the Great Reform Act of 1832.

  The Tories stayed in power for another fifteen years. Lord Liverpool remained prime minister until he had a stroke in 1827 and died the following year, aged fifty-eight. His old Christ Church friend George Canning succeeded him, but he, too, died after only 119 days in office, in August 1827, to be succeeded by Wellington, who was already a member of the cabinet as master-general of the Ordnance. William Huskisson’s financial acumen ensured that he achieved cabinet rank, but his career was cut short in 1830 at the opening of the Liverpool-to-Manchester railway, when he accidentally fell into the path of Stephenson’s ‘Rocket’. After the end of the war, Lord Mulgrave declined quickly. By 1820 he was described as ‘in the state both in look and power of a Man aged 90
though 64. He is so feeble that he cannot write a letter, and in his motion rather shuffles and creeps than walks.’14

  Many of the younger politicians who had been so instrumental during the Napoleonic War rose to the top. In 1815 Robert Peel was chief secretary in Ireland, Lord Palmerston was secretary at war and Lord Aberdeen was present at the Congress of Vienna: all were future prime ministers. Henry Goulburn, one of the negotiators of the treaty of Ghent with the Americans, was to become chancellor of the Exchequer twice and was briefly home secretary. John Charles Herries, the commissary-in-chief until the abolition of the post in 1817, became chancellor of the Exchequer, secretary at war and president of the Board of Control.

  The majority of the leading Opposition politicians were long lived.* The exception was Richard Brinsley Sheridan, harried by creditors, who died in poverty in 1816. Charles Grey, from his brief period as foreign secretary in 1807, was in Opposition for twenty-three years, but became prime minister when the Tory party split and Wellington resigned in 1830. Grey’s brief premiership saw the passing of the Great Reform Act, but he retired in 1834 to Howick in Northumberland, living until 1845. Lord Grenville played little part in public life after he had led the Ministry of All the Talents, although he was made chancellor of Oxford University in 1809, an office he held until 1834. His hard-fought election at Oxford was managed by William Wickham, whom Grenville as foreign secretary had made his spymaster in the French Revolutionary War, and who now was a frequent visitor to Grenville’s house at Dropmore Park in Buckinghamshire. Both died well into their seventies, Grenville in 1834 and Wickham in 1840, the latter’s achievements totally forgotten.15 The two Whig grandee bibliophiles had long, comfortable retirements after public service. Lord Spencer lived until 1834, Tom Grenville until 1846: Spencer’s 40,000 books, notable for volumes on the evolution of printing during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, were sold in 1892 to the John Rylands Library in Manchester. Grenville reasoned that since the great part of his 20,000 books had been purchased out of sinecure income, he should leave them to the British Museum.

  Admiralty officials, too, lived long. After his tempestuous spell as first lord, Lord St Vincent returned to sea during the Talents ministry, his final active command coming to an end in April 1807, at the age of seventy-two, but he had an active retirement which included staying in the south of France in his last years, until he died sixteen years later in March 1823.16 William Marsden, first secretary, retired in 1807 at the age of fifty-three, when, as he commented, ‘with the alterations in my habits of life, my health rapidly improved’.17 His fears of a shortened life caused by the pressures of office were unrealized: he lived until he was eighty-one, dying in 1836. His successor as second secretary in 1804, John Barrow, continued long in office, until 1845. His working relationship with his senior, the first secretary, John Wilson Croker, in office until 1830, developed into a remarkable friendship. Barrow’s eldest son married Croker’s adopted daughter, and both families shared a house at West Moseley near Windsor that Croker bought in 1828.18 Both pursued their literary interests before and after retirement, contributing to the Quarterly Review. Barrow wrote biographies of naval figures still useful and readable today, and his role in promoting the exploration undertaken by the Victorian navy constituted a career in itself. As second secretary he was largely responsible for commissioning warships for surveying and exploration purposes, particularly to the North-West Passage and Africa. He was an original member of the Royal Geographical Society, founded in 1830.19

  The army administrators enjoyed honourable retirements. The duke of York died in 1827, survived by his elder brother, who had become George IV in 1820 and lived until 1830. General David Dundas, the soldier of the old school, who came out of retirement to take the place of the duke as commander-in-chief in 1809, died peacefully at Chelsea Hospital in 1820, aged eighty-five. Lieutenant-General Sir Harry Calvert remained adjutant-general until 1820, and could look back on a remarkable twenty-one reforming years in office. He died in 1826. Henry Bunbury, the military undersecretary who had combined so well with Herries to ensure smooth supplies to the Peninsula, and now promoted to major general with a KCB, retired from the army in 1832 and lived a comfortable rural life until his death in 1860. The third of those young officials, George Harrison, assistant secretary at the Treasury, was knighted, stayed in office until 1826, and lived until 1841.

  The inventors fared less well. Samuel Bentham felt that he had been shouldered out of the navy, as indeed he had, and that his achievements had been insufficiently recognized. In 1814 he went to live in France, but returned to England in 1826. He died in London in 1830. His protégé Marc Isambard Brunel, whose talents had created the block mills at Portsmouth, poured his money into a factory in Battersea that produced boots for the army, mechanized on the same lines as the block mills, a logical direction for his talents. Peace in 1815, however, left him with a large stock of unsold boots and debts. After unsuccessfully petitioning Palmerston in the War Office for some relief, and suffering further financial loss because of the failure of his bank, Brunel was arrested and thrown into a debtors’ prison in 1821. When it became known that Brunel was in correspondence with the Russian government seeking employment, powerful figures, including Wellington, intervened and his debts were paid by government. His career of invention and design continued, and he died in 1849, aged eighty-one.20 William Congreve became involved in a financial scandal in 1826, after which he fled to France, where he died in penury in 1828 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Toulouse. The French gave Congreve a funeral with full military honours.

  These tales were, however, nothing to the tragedy of Lord Castlereagh, who became Lord Londonderry after the death of his father in 1821. The following year, depressed, unpopular and overworked, the foreign secretary cut his throat at his home at Cray in Kent. The cause of this suicide has generated much speculation – theories include blackmail, the appearance of the tertiary stage of syphilis, the latent symptoms of severe gout or even rabies – but there can be no doubting the contribution of overwhelming political pressure and a consequent well-documented mental debilitation. His obsessive work ethic was remarked upon by Wilberforce: ‘If he had suffered his mind to enjoy such occasional remissions, it is highly probable that the strings would never have snapped as they did, from over-tension.’21 Castlereagh’s mind was officially pronounced deranged, thus enabling him as a suicide to be buried in consecrated ground. He was so unpopular that fellow ministers feared that disturbances might occur during a public funeral, but it passed off peacefully, and the foreign secretary was buried next to his mentor Pitt in Westminster Abbey.*

  By the efforts of all these men, and the nation as a whole, Britain had survived two decades of war, and was now safe from invasion. Its economy was powerful and growing, while those of the Continental powers were wasted and weak. The eyes of the government and governed had been on the Continent, but the most significant long-term change brought about by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars was a vast increase in British domination of the seas. Without planning strategically to do so, Britain now controlled the world’s safest harbours, and developed naval bases and garrisons to guard them. In 1792 Gibraltar, Halifax in Nova Scotia, English Harbour in Antigua and Kingston in Jamaica had long been in British possession, and Sydney in Australia had been settled from 1788. By 1814 Britain had created a network of fourteen naval bases, including Malta, Corfu and Trincomalee in Ceylon.22 Gibraltar, appropriated over a hundred years before in 1704, had no great harbour, nor had the Cape of Good Hope, both now British; but they were of such strategic importance that they, too, were secured, fortified and defended. Before the French Revolutionary War Britain had owned twenty-six colonies; in 1816 that figure was forty-three.23 The ‘empire’, as it increasingly came to be called, was one of the unforeseen consequences of success in resisting the long siege of Britain by Napoleon.24

  Appendix 1

  Officials in Government Departments Involved in the
War 1793–1815

  (*) Member of Parliament concurrent with office. Naval and military ranks are those reached at the end of the period of office. Only the chairmen of junior boards are included in this appendix as space is limited, and commissioners on these boards are omitted.

  The numbers employed in the offices and the total salary bill for the years 1797, 1805, 1810 and 1815 are taken from Parliamentary Papers, 1830–31 (92): Public Offices Employment.

  The responsibilities and relationships between senior and subordinate government boards were not as simple as this appendix might imply. The Transport Board, for instance, is here positioned under the Admiralty, but the many masters of the chairmen of the Transport Board have been noted in Chapters 4 and 7. The position of the secretary at war was similarly complex, particularly in relation to finance and the Treasury. To give only one example, he was not responsible for barrack expenditure, yet he appointed all the deputy barrack masters-general and barrack masters (Commission of Military Enquiry, Sixth Report, p. 278). Anomalies had developed over time, and patronage and the right of appointment were not given up lightly.