by Roger Knight
21. Cornhill Military Association, founded in May 1798, was drawn from volunteers from the Cornhill Ward of the City of London. Such local organizations were abandoned when war was resumed in 1803, when volunteers in London were mostly concentrated into eleven large City regiments of Loyal London Volunteers. By autumn 1803 over 12,000 had come forward from the City, and over 14,000 from Westminster.
POLITICIANS
22. Henry Addington, prime minister from March 1801 to May 1804. Although he had been a fair and impartial Speaker of the House of Commons, Addington was a weak debater. From 1812, as Lord Sidmouth, he was home secretary in Liverpool’s government.
23. Lord St Vincent, first lord of the Admiralty from February 1801 to May 1804. St Vincent brought to the Admiralty a quarterdeck style and a conviction that the administration of the navy was rotten to the core. His attempts at reform ended in a lengthy political furore, a navy with low morale and ships unprepared for the renewal of war.
24. Charles Grey, first lord of the Admiralty from February to September 1806, then foreign secretary until March 1807. Long years of fluent criticism of Pitt’s government were not transformed into administrative and political capacity when in office.
25. Thomas Grenville, first lord of the Admiralty from September 1806 to April 1807. Grenville was a reluctant but conscientious minister. Some of his hesitancy is captured by this portrait of 1807, a contrast with the assurance of his younger brother, William Wyndham Grenville.
INDUSTRIAL POWER
26. Chatham Dockyard in 1794. Major investments had been made in the 1780s to renew the ropery and rigging-houses (right). These buildings were started in 1787, completed in about 1792, and still stand.
27. Plymouth Dockyard in 1798. Substantial docks for refits and repairs of ships of the line are at left and centre, while a row of slips for the construction of large warships can be seen to the right. Moored on the River Hamoaze (bottom) are a store hulk and the yard mast crane with its reinforced mast, known as a sheer hulk (centre right foreground).
INVASION DEFENCE
28. Martello Towers in Pevensey Bay, looking east from Eastbourne, with Langney Point in the foreground and the cliffs above Hastings in the distance at right. This stretch of coast was a vulnerable open beach, sheltered from the prevailing south-westerly winds. Although many towers survive today, others have been destroyed by the sea or dismantled for building materials. This watercolour shows the original, continuous line of towers, which gave the single 24-pounder guns on top of each tower intersecting fields of fire.
29. The earl of Egremont in the uniform of the Sussex Yeomanry (1798). The eccentric third earl suggested to his neighbour the duke of Richmond that a professional soldier would do a much better job leading the volunteers. Richmond advised that the earl’s social standing ‘was of more consequence than any practical knowledge of the cavalry business’.
AROUND WHITEHALL
30. Banqueting Hall in Whitehall (1809). Since so many soldiers were garrisoned in London, Inigo Jones’s Great Hall was turned into a military chapel; the painted ceiling can be clearly seen. The civilian figures listening to the sermon were drawn by Thomas Rowlandson, who cannot help introducing an element of caricature.
31. The Board Room of the Board of Trade (1809), which acted as a branch of the Privy Council concerned with commercial matters. Rather than frame policies, the Board monitored trade and collected statistics, important tasks during the economic struggle with Napoleon.
THE COPENHAGEN OPERATION
32. British forces before they marched into Copenhagen, 7 September 1807. After three days of fierce bombardment, the Danes surrendered and an armistice was signed. Smoke can still be seen drifting over the houses, with the unprepared Danish Fleet moored in the background. British regiments in the foreground include Highlanders and (centre) the King’s German Legion.
33. The Last Act of the English (1807), a Danish view of the destruction of Danish warships in Copenhagen Dockyard. As the primary purpose of the expedition was to deny Napoleon the use of the Danish Fleet, every floating warship was sailed back to British ports. Here, British seamen have just pulled over the nearly completed ship at right centre, its back broken.
34. George Canning in 1810, after his duel with Castlereagh and resignation from the cabinet in October 1809. Thomas Lawrence captures something of Canning’s complexity and defiance.
35. The Cumberland merchant ship engaging four French lugger privateers off Folkestone, 13 June 1811. This spirited action by a lone and damaged merchantman was witnessed from the cliffs near Folkestone, and became a minor sensation.
36. William Windham was a brilliant conversationalist, wit and dilettante, whose ministerial career demonstrated that brains without common sense can be disastrous. He was a lackadaisical secretary at war in the 1790s, but obsessively enthusiastic in his support for the Vendéan rebels in south-west France. His bizarre performance as secretary of state for war and the colonies in the Ministry of All the Talents tried the patience of his ministerial colleagues and gave heart to the opposition.
37. George Rose was a hard-working and devoted follower of Pitt, but a man of limited talents. He was at the centre of public affairs for thirty-five years, including secretary of the Treasury (1783-1801) and treasurer of the navy (1807-18), but to his great regret never achieved cabinet rank.
LATER TORY POLITICIANS
38. Spencer Perceval took over as prime minister after the death of Lord Portland in late 1809, with a divided cabinet, domestic unrest in the north of England and doubts about the country’s ability to finance the Peninsular War. He held the government together at the cost of deep personal unpopularity, and was assassinated in 1812.
39. Lord Mulgrave, foreign secretary from 1805 to 1806, first lord of the Admiralty from 1807 to 1810 and master-general of the ordnance from 1810 to 1817. As first lord, Mulgrave drove through extensive naval reforms.
40. Lord Liverpool (prime minister 1812–27) was awkward, sensitive and querulous, perceiving slights where none were intended, but was also modest, conciliatory and trusted. He patiently handled Wellington’s incessant demands from the Peninsula, and made an early, shrewd assessment of the consequences of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow.
41. Lord Castlereagh, secretary of state for war from 1805 to 1806 and 1807 to 1809, foreign secretary from 1812 to 1822, was perhaps the most driven of all the politicians of the era. Characteristically here, Castlereagh looks straight ahead, and with a level and unflinching gaze.
NORMAN CROSS PRISONERS OF WAR DEPOT
42. The Block House
Prisoners Baking Their Own Bread by Captain Durrant, presumably an officer in the militia. Land was purchased in 1796, structures (almost entirely of wood) rapidly erected and the first prisoners of war received in mid 1797. The site eventually covered forty-two acres. Between 1797 and 1814 an estimated 30,000 prisoners of war passed through.
FRENCH AND BRITISH WARSHIP LAUNCHES
43. Antwerp: the launch of the 80-gun Friedland on 2 May 1810, watched by Napoleon and the empress, accompanied by the king and queen of Westphalia. It was a great public occasion, attended by thousands, and generated much propaganda, but the Friedland never left the Scheldt. At least five other large warships can be seen on the slips standing in frame.
44. Fishbourne, Isle of Wight: the launch of the 36-gun frigate Magicienne, at Daniel List’s Yard, 3 August 1812, with a contrasting lack of ceremony. List built two small brigs and two substantial frigates in this tiny inlet on the north coast of the Isle of Wight.
The Magicienne was 145 feet long, mounted thirty-six 18-pound guns and had a crew of 264. She served off the coast of Spain before 1815, and subsequently in the East Indies and in the Mediterranean.
THE YOUNG REFORMERS
45. John Wilson Croker was a voluble and brilliant Irishman, appointed first secretary of the Admiralty in 1809 at twenty-nine. A fluent parliamentary performer, he made his name by forcing from office a senior official wh
o had swindled the government out of substantial sums.
46. John Barrow, second secretary of the Admiralty for forty years (1804–6 and 1807–45). Barrow and Croker worked at the Admiralty together for twenty-one years, and became a powerful team.
47. In 1805, at 38, George Harrison was appointed by Pitt to the new non-political post of assistant secretary in the Treasury. With good sense and a tremendous capacity for work, he served five prime ministers until the end of the war and became a valued adviser to them all.
48. Lord Palmerston c. 1806, the year in which he left St John’s College, Cambridge. He became an MP and an admiralty commissioner in 1807 and secretary at war in 1809. When he presented his first Army Estimates in early 1810, George Rose commented: ‘I never heard statements made with more precision and clearness in the House of Commons.’
PREMATURE VICTORY CELEBRATIONS
49. Banquet given by the Corporation of London for the prince regent, the emperor of Russia and the king of Prussia, 18 June 1814. By this time Tsar Alexander had grown weary of attention, and relations among the royal party were tense. His sister, the grand duchess of Russia, who insisted on attending what was to be an all-male occasion, attempted to stop the singing of the National Anthem by threatening to have a nervous fit.
50. Fortress and balloon in Green Park, with an army officer, presumably Sir William Congreve the Younger, supervising the setting up of fireworks, 1 August 1814.
51. The duke of Wellington in a watercolour study which accurately conveys both his assurance and a degree of vulnerability. Quick-witted, fearless and physically healthy, he understood the virtues of flexibility, knew how to use intelligence and had a formidable grasp of logistical detail. He was, however, never willing to admit fault, and his political masters in London had a hard time with his constant complaints. But Wellington surely knew that he was the only man who could have lost the war in an afternoon.
52. The review of the Russian Army in Paris, 10 September 1815. Tsar Alexander designed this great pageant to impress the Allied sovereigns and the duke of Wellington, mounted here with other rulers of European states. The Russians, unscathed by the casualties of Waterloo, fielded 160,000 troops that day, of which 28,000 were cavalry, and 540 guns. A senior British Army officer wrote, ‘The sun glittered on their arms, and on the drawn sabers of the cavalry, to a distance that almost appears imaginary.’ Another commentator exclaimed, ‘Such a scene had never before been seen in Europe, and perhaps will never be seen again.’
Bibliography
DOCUMENTARY SOURCES
Readers will discern from the number of secondary works listed below that this book rests largely on the work of others. The subject addressed is so large that it could absorb many years’ work in the archives and appear in several volumes. I have, therefore, had to use original documents sparingly and pragmatically.
I have a large amount of notes from previous projects, among which are some that have survived unused from my time as a research student forty years ago. If the book is over-rich in the details of naval administration, this is because of my many years of reading and working among the archives of the National Maritime Museum, as well as familiarity with the papers of Charles Middleton (NMM, MID) and those of the shipowner Michael Henley (NMM, HNL). The other NMM references are to the personal papers of naval officers such as Lord Keith (NMM, KEI), Lord Hood (NMM, HOO) and Sir Charles Morice Pole (NMM,WYN). I also made use of the museum’s letters written to Nelson (NMM, CRK) in the collection purchased by John Wilson Croker in 1817 on behalf of the government, when ministers in the Liverpool administration were concerned that compromising documents about the admiral might be published. My recent work on the victualling of the navy between 1793 and 1815 left me with unused material from the British Library relating to Lord Spencer from Althorp (Add. MSS 75792); from Pitt’s papers in the National Archives (TNA, PRO 30); and from Addington’s in the Devon Heritage Centre (DHC).
I have also specifically used collections that are less well known. These include, from the National Maritime Museum, Evan Nepean’s intelligence letters (NMM, NEP/2 and 3) and the papers of Charles Philip Yorke (NMM, YOR) for his period as first lord of the Admiralty. Less often used, too, is the official correspondence from the Navy Board to the Admiralty contained in NMM, ADM BP, which consists of loose papers and enclosures of an awkward size that were left unbound, and that are of particular interest. The same can be said for the analysis of the planned expedition to take Brest in Sim Comfort’s collection (SCC). For similar reasons, I was tempted to buy from a dealer’s catalogue the log of the North Sea packet Prince of Wales. These logs are very rare because the vessels were owned by contractors and documents hardly ever survive, unlike those for naval ships.
In the United States, I consulted the papers of the first Lord Melville at William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor; in the Huntington Library I used the very full records of Tom Grenville’s brief time as first lord of the Admiralty in the Stowe–Grenville Collection (STG); and on a family visit to Austin, Texas, by chance I came across a small collection of letters written by Lord Castlereagh to Charles Stewart, his half-brother, in the Londonderry MSS at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas.
Only when I needed to illustrate particular points in detail did I turn to the National Archives (TNA). I looked up various episodes in the Admiralty in-and out-letters, and the Minutes of the Board (TNA, ADM 1, 2 and 3). Clive Wilkinson pointed me to the Abstracts of Logs in TNA, ADM 7, made by Admiralty clerks for the purpose of recording the times taken for voyages, from which averages could be calculated. Occasional use was made of the muster books (TNA, ADM 36) and captain’s logs (TNA, ADM 51). I made time to check the War Office in-letters in WO 1/361 relating to the Hugh Cleghorn episode, which, although others have written about it, was so extraordinary that I wanted to see the evidence for myself. The Commissariat out-letters in TNA, WO 58, made interesting reading and in a few cases I made use of the Treasury papers (TNA, T). Details for the militia and the volunteers came from the muster and pay books (TNA, WO 13) and the records of militia regiments (TNA, WO 68). I also took advantage of a speaking engagement at the Monmouth Castle and Regimental Museum to look at the regimental order-books of the Royal Monmouth and Brecon Militia (RMRE).
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