Britain Against Napoleon
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* All the royal dukes had been given high military or naval rank and were keen to secure glamorous postings. Aside from the duke of York, only the duke of Kent saw some service, in the West Indies, and in the Maritime Provinces in Canada. During the Peace of Amiens he was governor of Gibraltar. The duke of Clarence, the future William IV, wanted to be commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, a possibility of such disastrous implications that ministers kept the ill and exhausted Admiral Collingwood at sea with no leave until his death in 1810 (Bartlett, ‘British Army’, pp. 42–4; Rodger, Command of the Ocean, p. 555).
* In 1819, 64,000 men were stationed in Britain and by 1825 that number had fallen to 44,000 (Burroughs, ‘Unreformed Army’, pp. 162, 164).
* William Windham had died in 1810 in bizarre circumstances. He was returning home late one night in July 1809 when he saw a fire in Conduit Street, where a friend had a nearby house containing a valuable library. He and others hurriedly emptied the books from the house, but in doing so he fell and bruised his hip, from which a tumour developed. He died after an operation to remove it (Rosebery, Windham, Vol. II, pp. 369–70).
* Political pressure and overwork were the primary factors in the suicides of two of Castlereagh’s most honourable political opponents, Samuel Romilly and Samuel Whitbread, who took their lives in 1815 and 1818 respectively. Both these deaths were known to have affected Castlereagh. Lord Ellenbrough suffered a similar severe mental decline before his death in 1818 (Bew, Castlereagh, pp. 538–57). The retrospective diagnosis of Castlereagh’s possible syphilis is laid out in Hunt, The Duel, pp. 177–85.
* House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century, Sheila Lambert (ed.), 2 vols. (Wilmington, Delaware, 1975); Torrance, ‘Social Class’, pp. 59–60, 68, 76.
* Parliamentary Papers: Commons Reports, 1806.
* House of Commons Journal, 1787–93; Eleventh Report, 1792, pp. 264–374; Albion, Forests and Sea Power, p. 439.
* Parliamentary Papers: Commons Reports, 1797–8.
* Parliamentary Papers: Commons Reports, 1803–6; most of these reports are printed in Parliamentary Debates; Albion, Forest and Sea Power, pp. 439–40.
* Parliamentary Papers: Commons Reports, 1806–9.
* In MSS in TNA, ADM 106/3110 (Morriss, Royal Dockyards, pp. 205, 231).
† Parliamentary Papers: Commons Reports, 1806–12.
‡ Volunteers List, 1804, p. 436.