Britain Against Napoleon

by Roger Knight

  * Each tower was issued with a hundred rounds of solid shot, twenty each of case-shot, grape-shot, common shells, 8-pound cartridges, as well as half a hundredweight of slow match and forty junk wads, and gunpowder. Of these, the case-shot was the most damaging anti-personnel ammunition, effective at 350 yards. The ‘heavy’ case-shot consisted of 84 6-ounce balls packed inside a thin metal canister, which burst on firing: a single round was almost as lethal as a volley of musket-fire from an infantry regiment. For short periods it was possible for an efficient gun-crew to fire three rounds a minute (Coad, Dymchurch Martello Tower, p. 12).

  * At a monthly cost of £39.12s.11½d., which included an innkeeper’s allowance, beer allowance, as well as £2.7s.9¾d. towards the cost of the extra price of bread and meat (Pay Lists 1803–4, TNA, WO 10/528).

  * Fascines were bundles of sticks placed in trenches or ditches so that soldiers could cross the obstruction, used since at least Roman times,

  † In Aug. 1807 an Act was passed establishing commissioners to maintain the canal and to authorize rates of toll. The expense to date was £143,081. In its early years it needed considerable subsidies for maintenance. Probably as a result of criticism over the great expense of an untested project, political heavyweights were appointed as commissioners: the prime minister, chancellor of the Exchequer, secretary of state for war, secretary at war, the speaker of the House of Commons and the commander-in-chief. In all, up to 1830, seven prime ministers gave advice on how to run the canal (Vine, Military Canal, pp. 80, 82–4, 227–8).

  * For cost comparison purposes, a contract-built 74-gun ship built in the Napoleonic War, complete and fitted, totalled between £80,000 and £90,000 (Winfield, British Warships, pp. 77–86).

  * Evidence on the conspiracy is scarce owing to the wholesale destruction of Alien Office documents, a process that started in 1834. The diplomat Francis Drake, then based in Bavaria, was implicated in the assassination plot. After his death in 1821, Lord Hawkesbury, by then Lord Liverpool, purchased Drake’s papers from his two sons, who were persuaded that it was in the national interest not to publish them, as Drake had requested in his will. The two sons received an annuity paid out of the civil list (Sparrow, ‘Alien Office’, p. 301; Durey, Wickham, p. 194). In 1836 the functions of the Alien Office were transferred to the Home Office (Sainty, Home Office, p. 5).

  * The effective integration of tactical military intelligence was achieved by Wellington in the Peninsula, when British diplomats, naval officers and civilians cooperated closely (Ward, Wellington’s Headquarters, pp. 29–30; Davies, ‘Intelligence during the Peninsular War’, pp. 205–6; ‘Diplomats as Spymasters’, pp. 40–50).

  † Wickham returned from Switzerland in early 1798 and was made one of the undersecretaries of the Home Office from Mar. 1798 to Jan. 1801.

  * Not only with strategic and tactical intelligence, but also with navigational data collected by the Hydrographic Office. A good example of the need to centralize and analyse this sort of information was the requirement for accurate charts and navigational information on the Baltic, which before 1801 had not seen a British fleet for seventy years, but in 1807 and from 1808 to 1812 a large British naval presence was in the Baltic, and the quality and quantity of charts improved (Davey, ‘Hydrographical Office’, pp. 81–103).

  * The account of a German traveller in 1810 showed how the screening of overseas arrivals worked in practice.

  On arrival at Harwich from Holland we dropped anchor, and a boat with custom officers pushed off from the shore with Mr Billingby the director of the Alien Office at their head. The former climbed aboard and began a personal search upon such persons who were likely to carry contraband goods about them … In the meantime Mr Billingby to whom a nominal list of passengers was delivered by the captain, began to call them over; and taking one half of us in his boat, made for the shore. They showed us into the White Hart Inn, and then took the boat again to fetch the rest. Our baggage was taken to the Custom House and there kept till our licences arrived, for which we had without delay applied to the Central Alien Office through our friends in London.

  (Trinder, Harwich Packets, p. 71, quoting Letters from Albion to a Friend on the Continent, 1814)

  † In Aug. 1804 the Immortalité took on board a stranger for a fortnight when cruising off Boulogne, whose name, a midshipman recalled in later years, was never known, and whom ‘I must still designate by the appellation of “Mr Nobody”, the cognomen by which alone he was known to the midshipmen.’ The ship kept close to the shore

  in order to give an opportunity of pursuing certain researches … which … he did with the greatest earnestness and coolness, unruffled and undisturbed by the showers of shot and shell that fell around the ship, splashing the water about her at every instant. The object of this scrutiny seemed to be to ascertain … the fortifications around Boulogne, and the position and bearings of the different batteries which faced the sea, and also the exact distance at which the flotilla in the roads was anchored from the shore.

  The crew were glad to see him go ashore back in the Downs, as he made the ship ‘serve every day, whilst he was on board, as a target for our friends to amuse themselves by practising at’ (Crawford, Reminiscences, pp. 59–60).

  * A retired French officer, who had in the past given information to the British, was brought by a British frigate for an interview with Collingwood, with information about a French force that was shortly to sail from Toulon. The admiral, who already knew this, suspected that the Frenchman’s intention was in fact to gauge the readiness of the British Fleet. He therefore ordered the fleet in Mahon Harbour to look as though every ship was refitting, with topmasts struck, sails unbent, scaffolding over the sides, painting and caulking in full swing. When the Frenchman had reboarded the frigate after his interview with Collingwood and left the island, the captains were immediately summoned and the fleet made ready, so that ‘the whole fleet, which a few hours before seemed half dismantled, and all bustle and confusion, is now in perfect order, and only waits for the land-breeze in the morning to lift their anchors and proceed to sea’ (Crawford, Reminiscences, p. 184).

  * The annexation of Heligoland in Sept. 1807 allowed travellers greater freedom to enter Britain, through the fast ‘Bye Boats’, sailing from Harwich and Yarmouth, licensed to sail without convoy, but they took profitable passengers away from the packets. In May 1811 the packet-boat commanders complained to the postmaster-general about the activities of these boats, requesting that their licences be restricted (Trinder, Harwich Packets, pp. 71–2).

  * The log of the Prince of Wales records thirty-seven round trips between Aug. 1804 and Sept. 1807, an average of just over a dozen a year: the vessel delivered mail to Cuxhaven (4), Husum (11), Tonningen (2), Heligoland (3), Marstrand (2) and Gothenburg (15).

  † The importance of the route was underlined in 1807 by the transfer by warship through Gothenburg of £500,000 of specie to the emperor of Russia, ‘payable to Messrs Harman’, part of a sum that was due to Russia from the subsidy treaty of 1805 (Treasury to Admiralty, 13 Jan. 1807, NA, ADM 12/34; Sherwig, Guineas and Gunpowder, pp. 149, 366). (See Chapter 13.)

  * Huskisson was MP because Harwich was a ‘Treasury seat’, with control over customs and Post Office patronage: he thus nominated packet captains to the postmasters-general (Thorne, House of Commons, Vol. II, p. 160; Trinder, Harwich Packets, p. 104).

  † Transporting King’s Messengers with diplomatic despatches had priority over ordinary mail. At Gothenburg in Nov. 1804 the Prince of Wales had just sailed for Harwich with the mails when after half an hour it had to turn back to port. The captain noted the delay in the log: ‘Came a boat with an order to stop for Despatches which had just arrived.’ In Jan. 1806 she sailed from Cuxhaven ‘with Messrs Basset & Mills, two of HM Messengers’. In July 1807 the packet was returning to Harwich: ‘Came a boat from Yarmouth and took ye messenger and Mail onshore’ (Prince of Wales log, 27 Nov. 1804, 4 Jan. 1806, 10 July 1807).

  * Occasionally
packets were ordered to transport horses for ambassadors or the military.Four horses belonging to Sir Robert Wilson, appointed as military commissioner to the Prussian court, were taken in Dec. 1806 by the Auckland packet, but the weather was so bad that no landing could be attempted and all four horses died (22 Dec.1806, TNA, FO 33/36; Glover, Wilson, pp. 30–31).

  * There was little trouble from the landowners. Only at West Wittering in West Sussex was there a difficulty because a naval captain had gone to ‘great expense in fitting it up for his own Residence’ during the peace. He agreed to move after pressing for ‘some consideration’ (Kitchen, ‘Coast Signal Stations’, p. 342; Mallinson, Semaphore, p. 136).

  * The veracity of this story is enhanced by evidence of Calder’s reputation. Among his detractors was Lord St Vincent, who described Calder’s ‘confused, wrongheaded & total incapacity to perform the duty of a first Lieutenant, much less that of a distributor of my orders’ (to Evan Nepean, 3 Sept. 1798, NMM, NEP/4, fol. 147). Thomas Grenville took opinions on Calder in 1806: ‘those who acquit him of want of courage dwell however very much upon his extreme indecision in critical situations’ (to the marquis of Buckingham, 25 Nov. 1806, HL, STG 37 (34)).

  † In Apr. 1807 Napoleon added disinformation by instructing his minister of marine to start activities at Brest that would appear to be expedition preparations: at the same time the minister was to inform the United Irishmen of an impending invasion to ensure that this false information was given the widest circulation (Munch-Petersen, Copenhagen, p. 95; Hicks, ‘Napoleon, Tilsit’, p. 128).

  * Garlike’s informant was Captain Beauman of the Prins, who had been to the dockyard on 25 July. He reported: ‘there is not at present the shadow of the appearance of the equipment of any fleet, and it is impossible that any such could be made & hid from a naval eye. The state of the fleet is precisely the same as it has been ever since Lord Nelson’s battle’ (Grenville to Buckingham, 25 Aug. 1807, quoting Garlike’s letter to him, HL, STG 38 (3)).

  * D’Antraigues was a man of great charm and his European contacts were wide, but he was also a long-term royalist adventurer. Jane Austen, a stern judge of charm, met him some time later. She described him as ‘a very fine looking man, with quiet manners, good enough for an Englishman … if he would but speak English, I would take to him’ (Munch-Petersen, Copenhagen, p. 121, quoting Deirdre Le Faye (ed.), Jane Austen’s Letters (Oxford, 1995), pp. 184–5). D’Antraigues and his wife were murdered in their house in Barnes in London in July 1812 by a servant, who also took his own life, for motives that are still unclear (Sparrow, Secret Service, p. 347).

  * Naval intelligence reports still flowed in on the state of the docks and harbour of Cherbourg, which were continually building throughout the war (e.g., Captain Lord Beauclerk, H.M.S. Royal Oak, off Cherbourg, to C. P. Yorke, 27 June 1811, NMM, YOR/2). The outer harbour was opened in 1813, but the works were not properly completed until the middle of the nineteenth century. Only a handful of warships were built there before 1815 (Epin, Arsenaux sous Napoléon, p. 160).

  * Although this was double the number of the British royal dockyard workforce of 12,000 at the same date (Morriss, Dockyards, p. 106), the British Fleet by this time in the war was largely built in private shipyards.

  * An ‘unaudited’ account did not mean that a contractor had not been paid, but that his account had not been adjusted for any short measure or poor quality that might have been noted by the inspecting clerk or artificer when the goods were accepted by government (although in a minority of cases money could be owed to the contractor). Audited accounts were also made public, and, until that point, competitors did not officially know the price paid to the successful contract bidder.

  * Some of the victualling-contract ledgers from late in the Napoleonic War, in the National Archives, are so heavy that it is not possible for a single person to carry them.

  † For comparison, total government income in 1815 was £77.9 million and, in the same year, a 100-gun warship, H.M.S. St Vincent, was launched at Plymouth Dockyard at a cost of £110,549 (Mitchell and Deane, British Historical Statistics, p. 581; Winfield, British Warships, p. 12).

  * In parallel, the workforce in the East India Company’s London warehouses more than doubled, from 1,393 in 1785 to 2,700 in 1813 (Bowen, Business of Empire, p. 264).

  * Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House had been a chapel royal for some years, but in 1808 it was decided to convert it into a military chapel, designed to accommodate over 2,000 guardsmen (Crook and Port, King’s Works, pp. 545–6).

  * A messenger travelling outside London would be ‘off the stones’, as it was termed, a reference to the lack of paved roads outside London. The commission registered its ‘disapprobation’ of the high rates of travel allowances (Commission of Military Enquiry, Thirteenth Report, pp. 11, 46).

  * When Barham was first lord of the Admiralty in 1805 he was paid £3,000, of which £2,000 was paid out of the sale of old stores; as John Barrow commented, ‘a shabby and incorrect mode of paying a great officer of state’. On his last day in office, Barham left a minute on his desk to put the first lord on the same footing as the secretaries of state. However, nothing came of it until 1812, when the first lord’s salary was raised to £5,000 (Barrow, Autobiography, pp. 289–90).

  * George Rose reported a conversation with the king, who often stayed with Rose at his house, Cuffnells in Hampshire, as the royal retinue went down to Weymouth for the summer. The king thought that ‘Lord St Vincent was governed by a worthless man of the name of Tucker, who had been his Secretary’ (29 Oct. 1804, Harcourt, Rose Diaries, Vol. II, p. 181).

  * Samuel passed his ideas to his brother Jeremy, who incorporated them into his ‘panopticon’ prison, with a single prison officer in a central inspection lodge, ‘seeing without being seen’, enforcing ‘direction and order’. When Samuel was sent to Russia by the Admiralty to oversee the building of warships for Britain in 1805, he designed and built a wooden panopticon in St Petersburg large enough to hold 3,000 workmen. The building contained wood-processing machines designed to be operated by unskilled peasants. The absolutism of Russia was more conducive to Bentham’s frightening methods of control (Ashworth, ‘System of Terror’, p. 69; Morriss, Royal Dockyards, p. 213).

  * St Vincent was asked by the comptroller of the Navy Board, Sir Andrew Snape Hamond, if the commission was to be ‘under the privy seal or parliament, and I rather inclined to the former, but upon further enquiry and consideration I decided for the latter’ (St Vincent to John Markham, 14 Dec. 1802, Markham, Markham, p. 13). A parliamentary commission would make more political capital, while a privy seal commission could be implemented without debate by an order-in-council.

  * Tucker was not a popular man. When Tom Grenville took over as first lord in September 1806 he was loath to agree automatically to Tucker’s continuing as second secretary. ‘I shall try to keep him,’ Grenville wrote to his elder brother, the marquis of Buckingham, ‘but to such a forward position as 2nd Secretary, some of those whom I want as confidential at the board may object, & therefore as I before said, I cannot look to the livery till the Steward & Butler are agreed on’ (4 Oct. 1806, HL, STG 37 (28)).

  * Nevertheless, on his appointment to the commission, the Whig Thomas Creevey moved in parliament for an enquiry into Fordyce’s financial affairs, as the arrears on his land tax account remained unpaid. Fordyce was, however, warmly defended by Pitt (Thorne, House of Commons, Vol. III, pp. 789–90).

  † The secretary of the commission was initially John Deas Thompson, but after his appointment to the Navy Board in July 1805 his place was taken by the Navy Office clerk John Thomas Briggs, later Sir John Briggs. John Finlaison was second clerk (NMM, MID/6/11). Finlaison’s subsequent career gave further proof of his talents (see Appendix 2).

  * ‘The line of duty committed to the Joint Secretaries seems of a nature too important to admit of sudden or frequent changes in office, and too laborious to allow of other avocations. For these reasons, we are of opinion
that one of the said Secretaries, whose duty should be to attend to the current business of the Office, should be stationary in his situation, and be precluded from sitting in Parliament’ (Commission on Fees, Second Report, p. 56). It was not until 1867 that the position came to be known as the permanent undersecretary.

  † Harrison’s hard work was notable. In 1812 he was confined to his house with gout, where, as he wrote to Perceval, he worked as hard ‘at home as at the Treasury’, aided by two private secretaries, ‘without whom it would have been utterly impossible to have got through the business of the Office’ (Gray, Perceval, p. 313, quoting 14 Jan. 1812, Perceval MSS).

  * Ambrose Serle wrote to Barham of the Whigs that ‘an early termination of our commission would not be disagreeable to them’ (19 Nov. 1806, NMM, MID/1/168).