Britain Against Napoleon

by Roger Knight

  * Lady Holland, while making her way home after travelling on the Continent, found herself near the army and was invited to dine with the duke: ‘Almost all the persons immediately about the Duke are very young men, and as they live at headquarters, they fill his table and prevent him from inviting the general officers and colonels of regiments as frequently as it is usual for a Commander-in-Chief to do. This is one source of disgust … The Duke feels this, and sometimes expresses himself hardily, when he ought to act with severity’ (2 Nov. 1793, Ilchester, Lady Holland, Vol. I, p. 95n.).

  * When the news arrived in London, George Canning was at the opera, which stopped after half an hour because of ‘the bustle and hurry in the lower boxes … I never saw a finer or more affecting spectacle than the almost electric and universal sensation that seemed to pervade every part of the House – the transport and triumph which burst forth as soon as their astonishment had a little subsided.’ He was much amused by the stony-faced silence with which the news was greeted in a box opposite, in which sat the Bouverie family – Whigs and therefore opposed to the war. ‘The attention which they paid to the stage (rather than look about them to see rejoicing faces) was highly entertaining’ (10 June 1794, Jupp, Canning Letter Journal, p. 121).

  * The Treasonable Practices Act expanded definitions of treason to include attempts to coerce parliament, or attacks on the constitution, which were liable to seven years’ transportation. The Seditious Meetings Act banned lectures or meetings of more than fifty people (universities excepted) unless permitted by local magistrates.

  * Middleton’s remarkable reappearance in 1805 as first lord of the Admiralty at the age of seventy-nine was a political anomaly.

  * Similarly the French were reckoned to have lost 40,000 troops in their reconquest of San Domingo at the time of the Peace of Amiens (Holland Rose, ‘West Indian Commerce’, p. 37).

  † The King’s Bounty was £5 for an able seaman, £2.10s. for ordinary seamen and £1.10s. for landsmen. In addition, seamen would receive two months’ wages on volunteering, so an able seaman would clear £7. For volunteers in London, the Corporation added £2 for an able seaman and £1 for an ordinary seaman (Dancy, ‘Naval Manpower’, pp. 149–50).

  * In 1795 it was reckoned that 127,500 troops were required for the defence of Britain. A year later General David Dundas, then quartermaster-general of the forces, requested 16,000 cavalry and 100,000 infantry, compared to the actual numbers enlisted of 14,700 and 52,900. In 1796 there were still fewer than 10,000 volunteer infantry in England (Cookson, Armed Nation, pp. 26–7, 32). These figures broadly agree with Lieutenant-General Harry Calvert’s, who reckoned in Aug. 1796 that there were 110,000 troops of every kind in Britain (Verney, Harry Calvert, p. 451).

  * In Nov. 1796 the ‘Berks., Bucks., Oxon. and Hants Original Militia Society Office for Providing Substitutes for the New and Old Militia’ offered to find a substitute for an annual fee of one guinea (Horn, Rural World, p. 65).

  † Militia regiments were kept moving to another county every nine months or so (see Chapter 9).

  * Ambivalence about the militia was heard around at least one London dinner table in 1799. Lady Stafford reported to her son that one of her guests ‘felt it not a Situation for a Gentleman now to remain in a Militia Corps’ (Granville, Leveson Gower Correspondence, Vol. I, p. 269).

  * In 1799 a French privateer was seen in Weymouth Bay taking the brig Somerset, on passage from Poole to Bristol. A captain in the Weymouth and Wyke Volunteers took some of his company, and some Sea Fencibles, on board a small cutter and gave chase, despite the fact that they were armed only with muskets and bayonets. They succeeded in retaking the Somerset and went on to make an unsuccessful attempt to capture the privateer, a brave decision in view of the privateer’s superior guns over their own small arms (Clammer, ‘Dorset Volunteers’, p. 24). The recapture of a British ship by a volunteer army unit was unusual, to say the least.

  * Van Sommer, Consols, 1793–7. Consols were effectively the government securities of Great Britain. In 1752 many different stocks had been consolidated into a single stock bearing interest at 3 per cent.

  † The cost of living in Paris, with indices at 100 in 1790, was said to be 5,000 in Nov. 1795, and the plight of the poor was desperate (Godechat, ‘French Internal History’, p. 288).

  * Some thirty of the Frenchmen escaped from prison near Pembroke, showing more initiative than during the invasion, and made their way back to St Malo, using Lord Cawdor’s private yacht on the way (Lloyd, Prisoners of War, pp. 65–6).

  † The great Austrian loan of 1795 of £4,600,000 had resulted in the transfer of only £1,193,000 in hard money; the rest was in commercial bills (Sherwig, Guineas and Gunpowder, p. 88).

  * The seamen demanded equality with soldiers and their ‘shilling a day’. In 1793 an able seaman received £1.4s. per lunar month, and ordinary seaman 19s. By 1815 these figures were £1.13s. and £1.5s.6d. and the unskilled landsman £1.2s.6d. (Lewis, Social History, pp. 300, 303).

  † There were ‘unpleasant symptoms’, too, in one of the battalions of the Guards in London. An isolated instance among the artillery at Woolwich occurred on 27 May, and Pitt was woken in Downing Street by the accompanying gunfire (Fortescue, British Army, Vol. IV, Part 1, p. 530; Hague, Pitt, p. 404, quoting Wilberforce’s diary).

  * Lake ordered that no Irish prisoners were to be taken, following the example of General Hoche when suppressing the Vendéan rebels early in the war. At an engagement at Kilcullen David Dundas carried out these orders exactly, reporting that all 130 insurgents were killed, and none of his troops either killed or wounded. By contrast, at the Curragh a little later, he allowed the insurgents to surrender, for which he was criticized. Those United Irishmen who survived were imprisoned in Fort George near Inverness (Bartlett and Jeffrey, Military History of Ireland, p. 288).

  * One modern estimate of real output of the total industry and commerce of Great Britain is that (with indices at 100 in 1700) it nearly doubled between 1780 (index at 197) and 1800 (at 387), while in the export industries it more than doubled. From 1785 per capita output increased by 9 per cent per decade (Deane and Cole, Economic Growth, pp. 78, 80).

  * However, the phrase ‘civil servants in India’ can be found earlier, in a letter of 6 May 1796 from Spencer to the commander-in-chief of the East Indies Station, Admiral Peter Rainier (Althorp Papers, BL, Add. MSS 75682, quoted in Ward, ‘Rainier’, p. 48).

  * Pitt had intervened early in his administration to push for the appointment of Alexander Trotter as deputy paymaster of the navy, the man who eventually was to bring about the impeachment of his political master, and ex-treasurer of the navy, Henry Dundas. Pitt assured the banker Thomas Coutts that Trotter was ‘a Person of whose character I had a very respectable Testimony … I do not know with certainty what his [Dundas’s] decision will be’ (Pitt to Coutts, 29 Dec. 1785, Pitt Papers, WLC).

  * Despatches were made available in a cabinet room for ministers to read and memoranda in the Grenville papers in the British Library were initialled by ministers with recommendations (information from Michael Duffy, gratefully acknowledged). However, informality in decision-making was a hallmark of the times. Joseph Banks noted on some documents relating to the Macartney Embassy to China in 1792: ‘As most of the business of arranging this Embassy was done in Conversation, the Parties being all in London, Little Curious Matter can be expected among these Papers’ (Sutro Library, information from Alan Frost, for which I am similarly grateful).

  * At one cabinet meeting in 1801, when Addington was prime minister, St Vincent ‘finding nothing like business going on … got up, and said, if he was not wanted, he must go away, as really he had no time to throw away, and so left the Cabinet’ (28 Feb. 1801, Malmesbury, Correspondence of the First Earl, Vol. IV, p. 24).

  * It was, however, obvious on one occasion, which led to the memorable lines in an Opposition newspaper of a supposed conversation in the House between Pitt and Dundas: Hague, (Pitt, p. 308)

/>   I cannot see the Speaker, Hal, can you?

  What! Cannot see the Speaker, I see two!

  (Hague, Pitt, p. 308)

  † The same source also ‘asked Mr Wilberforce what made his fingers so black, and Mr Wilberforce told him that he was in the habit of taking opium before making a long speech; and “to that”, said he, “I owe all my success as a public speaker”’ (Fay, Huskisson, p. 71, quoting Lord Broughton, Recollections of a Long Life, Vol. III, 17 June 1827, pp. 203–4).

  * On one occasion the waiting room at the Admiralty was the scene of a remarkable tragedy, as William Young related: ‘Captain Eaton who acted in the Marlborough came to town this morning to wait on Ld. Spencer … he was observed to be very wild and to talk very incoherently, and while he was in the waiting room, he drew his dirk and stab’d himself in the belly and in the neck, of which he died in a very short time; he appeared to be quite mad’ (William Young to Charles Morice Pole, 21 July 1798, NMM, WYN/104).

  * In 1797 the naval departments together employed just under 400 commissioners, senior officials and clerks in Whitehall and Somerset House; by 1815 this had risen by over 50 per cent. The number of clerks in the Victualling Office in 1791 nearly doubled by 1805 (Parliamentary Papers, 1830–31 (92): Public Offices Employment, pp. 2–3).

  † Witness his crude satisfaction in a letter to Nepean on one occasion when, on the Mediterranean station, he called his captains to account, giving them ‘such a sit down, that, if it did not bring them to a stool, certainly made them piss and cry’ (15 Aug. 1798, NMM, NEP/4, fol. 137).

  * Old Lord Cornwallis was not sanguine about the duke’s appointment, writing privately in 1795: ‘Whether we shall get any good by this, God only knows, but I think that things cannot change for the worse in that department’ (Cornwallis to Colonel Ross, 31 Jan. 1795, Ross, Cornwallis, Vol. II, p. 284).

  * The shrewd comments of this gentle and unpolitical man show him to be a prototype of the modern civil servant. He had outside interests and for many years was Treasurer of the Royal Society. He wrote to his brother, Alexander Marsden, ‘I am going to meet a party of the Royal Society people, who are rather better company than your politicians’ (4 Oct. 1806, Marsden, Brief Memoir, p.129fn.). When Marsden retired, he confessed to a former Admiralty commissioner: ‘I never was in love with the business of the office but, like an honest man who marries an unamiable wife, I have always made the best of it, and endeavoured to do my duty’ (24 June 1807 to Alexander Marsden, reporting conversation with William Young, Marsden, Brief Memoir, p.133fn.).

  * Before the war a Foreign Office clerk recalled that the office hours were 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. to 11 p.m., but that there were many idle hours. Lord Grenville revised the hours on 1 Apr. 1799 to 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., and on post nights from 8 p.m. until business was completed (E. Taylor, The Taylor Papers (1913), quoting TNA, FO 366/671: courtesy of Michael Duffy).

  * The later inclusion of the expenditure of the Transport Board under the head of Naval Expenditure has given rise to the idea that the Admiralty was its governing board. The Transport Board eventually moved to offices in Dorset Court, Cannon Row, near the south of Whitehall and close to the Treasury, a long way from the other subordinate naval boards in Somerset House.

  * The agent for transports responsible for cartels in Paris in 1797 was Henry Swinburne, who used his diplomatic immunity in a number of ways, as well as arranging for the exchange of prisoners of war. In May 1797 a cartel was to sail from Nantes, and he informed Lord Spencer ‘600 prisoners besides officers from different paroles are to go immediately from Brest.’ By Aug. he reported that ‘the number of British Prisoners at present in France is reduced to a few hundred.’ Swinburne was still in Paris in Nov., anxiously awaiting his passport from the French authorities (Swinburne to Lord Spencer, 18 May, 14 Aug., 11 Nov. 1797, BL, Add. MSS 75813).

  * In the Foreign Office there were strong family links among the clerks. Thomas Bidwell was chief clerk between 1792 and 1817, and another Bidwell was employed concurrently, as were two Broughtons, two Rollestons and three Taylors (Collinge, Foreign Office, pp. 60, 61, 75, 79). The Taylors were sons of a friend of Grenville’s father-in-law (information from Michael Duffy).

  † In the Home Office there were thirty-four permanent clerks in post between 1782 and 1801, who entered the office between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, the sons of army officers, the landed gentry, lawyers or clergymen. Some had been educated at Eton, Harrow or Westminster. The Home Office could be a stepping stone to greater things: thirteen of the Home Office clerks resigned when promoted to a variety of posts, such as chief clerk to the Board of Trade, chief secretary to the government of Madras, or an inspector at the Audit Office (Nelson, Home Office, pp. 47–50).

  * Sinecures could also flourish at a low level. The position of landlord of the Bunch of Grapes pub, which was built over the gateway of the Tower of London, was held in sinecure by the gentleman porter of the Tower, whose income was made up of rents from the public house and an adjoining bar. Both pub and gateway were in a ruinous condition by the late 1780s, but no one was willing to pay for the repairs. Further, the master of the Tower held that the pub ‘was absolutely necessary for the garrison’. Five years later further repair estimates were obtained and the Treasury pressed for demolition. Finally, in 1797, local inhabitants petitioned Lord Cornwallis, the constable of the Tower, under ‘the apprehension that some persons will be buried under the ruins’. The Bunch of Grapes was finally demolished, when the stumbling block was removed by the Treasury’s agreement that the gentleman porter, who happened to be the bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, could be compensated by additions to his annual pension (Crook and Port, King’s Works, p. 487).

  † Abbot’s half-brother was Samuel Bentham, from 1796 inspector-general of naval works. In 1795 Canning met him at dinner with Abbot, describing Bentham in his journal as ‘a very sensible, well-informed man … a Col[onel] in the Russian Service – of two Regiments, one of which is at present quartered on the frontiers of China’ (10 Nov. 1795, Jupp, Canning Letter Journal, p. 222).

  ‡ Abbot’s next campaign was to improve and reform the records of church and state, badly stored in obscure locations. He established a Record Commission in 1799 and 1800 that noted the whereabouts and content of these archives, a remarkable effort in the middle of a war (Pugh, ‘Charles Abbot’, p. 326).

  * The victualling yards were much smaller. In 1800, for instance, their wage bill was just under a sixth of that of the dockyards (‘Account of the monies … 18 Feb. 1801’, NMM, ADM BP/21a, Navy Office).

  * The career of this tough but very effective administrator might have been ended by accident in 1797 in Ajaccio. A naval colleague recounted, ‘While Coffin and I were close together working in his garden at Ajaccio a ball pass’d close over our heads that was fir’d at him by a Corsican Rascal he had discharg’d from the Yard … a common amusement in that Island’ (Captain Ralph Willet Miller to his father, 2 Mar. 1797, White, Nelson’s Year of Destiny, p. 156).

  * In a very different area, the growing awareness of the importance of accurate government information led the duke of York in 1797 to order all army commanding officers to compile casualty lists and report the names of the dead to the War Office (Lin, ‘Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Families’, p. 107).

  † In the ten years between 1785 and 1794 British annual imports averaged £19.5 million and exports £14.2 million; in the next ten years, between 1795 and 1804, the figures were sharply increased: £24.3 million and £21.9 million (Deane and Cole, Economic Growth, p. 48).

  * Young changed his opinions on enclosures after his early advocacy, writing in 1801: ‘I had rather that all the commons of England were sunk in the sea, than that the poor should in future be treated on enclosing as they have generally been hitherto’ (Horn, Rural World, p. 51, quoting Young, ‘General Enclosure’, Annals of Agriculture, Vol. XXXVI, p. 214).

  * In 1795 Lord Auckland tried to impress Pitt with his capacity: ‘Such a system is alwa
ys to a certain extent a double espionage, but it is become more necessary for us than it was even in the last war – in that war I obtained, thro’ Americans, minutes of all despatches written by [Benjamin] Franklin deep from Paris; in one instance all the originals for Six months’ (20 Jan. 1795, TNA, PRO 30/8/40/2).

  * Another of Swinburne’s tasks was to buy books from Paris booksellers for Lord Spencer, first lord of the Admiralty and a noted bibliophile. Their curious correspondence reads as though the war was almost not happening. Perhaps significantly, the purchase of books was always dealt with first in the letters, before prisoner of war business and Sidney Smith’s welfare. The books, in Swinburne’s name at the Transport Board, were sent via Calais and forwarded to Messrs Fector and Minet at Dover, who sent them on to London. Spencer paid for them through official channels: ‘I shall remit the amount to Mr [John] March on your account’ (12, 21 Feb., 14 Aug. 1797, Althorp Papers, BL, Add. MSS 75813).