Beware of Heroes: Admiral Sir Sidney Smith's War against Napoleon

by Peter Shankland

  I now hold this unity of power that you have granted me, and I dare do more than he dares to imagine.

  Mr. Hugh Elliot learned with dismay, from a letter that Sir Sidney had addressed to him on 7th July, that his 4,000 piastres had been used to finance an armed insurrection that was driving the French helter-skelter out of Calabria. He was certainly in an awkward position — when the Allies had decided to withdraw their troops from Italy, as a result of the Battle of Austerlitz, he had protested to the commander-in-chief of the British force, Sir James Craig, and had ordered him to remain and defend Neapolitan territory. It was perhaps not an unreasonable order, considering that the presence of these troops had served as a pretext for Napoleon to make war on the Kingdom of Naples. Sir James Craig had refused to obey him. His attitude was also understandable: he maintained that the British force must be preserved for the more essential task of defending Sicily. The Cabinet had decided against Elliot, and he was accused of having acted under the undue influence of the Queen of Naples, the sister of Marie Antoinette. His career, therefore, was in jeopardy.

  He had now firmly accepted the official defeatist policy with regard to the possibility of holding the mainland of Italy, and it would never do for the Cabinet to get the impression that he still thought that the French could be met and defeated in Neapolitan territory. He immediately addressed a private and confidential letter to the new Foreign Secretary, Charles James Fox, disassociating himself from Sir Sidney and all his works.

  Some months ago [he wrote] 20,000 foreign troops with an almost equal number of Neapolitans were deemed too weak to wait for the approach of the French army which had not yet passed Bologna when the English and the Russians thought it advisable to re-embark.

  Since then, he continued, fears had increased because of the Austrian peace and because Neapolitans had accepted military and civil employment under Joseph Bonaparte, and yet:

  without any favourable change of circumstances, the language of the court, hitherto so despondent, is all at once entirely altered, and the king in all his notes and proclamations and Public Acts, speaks loudly of the recovery of the Kingdom of Naples by force of arms...The solution of this problem is the accidental arrival of Sir Sidney Smith at Palermo while I was with Sir John Acton and the king at Messina. The Queen profited of that moment to work upon the peculiarities of his disposition etc. etc.

  He rambled on complaining that Sir Sidney had been acting under the undue influence of the queen — the very same accusation that had been levelled at himself. It was clear, however, that Sir Sidney had come out with the full intention of implementing Nelson’s plan for the liberation of Italy: this was not the result of any influences in Sicily, though he was on friendly terms with the queen, too friendly some said. Mr. Elliot continued in his private and confidential letter to the Foreign Secretary:

  In the meantime Sir John Stuart had carried into execution his truly well-conceived and military project when his victorious career was on a sudden arrested by armed bodies of men, acting under the authority of Sir Sidney Smith who had assumed to himself the exercise of all civil and military power in the Kingdom of Naples.

  No doubt Mr. Elliot was justifiably annoyed that Sir Sidney had accepted the post of Viceroy of Calabria without reference to him, but here he overstated his case, to say the least of it. Stuart’s victorious career was not on a sudden arrested by the partisans; on the contrary their co-operation contributed largely to his success. Neither had he harboured any thoughts of further victories after the Battle of Maida, but only of a retreat to Sicily as expeditiously as possible.

  Sir Sidney had appealed urgently for more money. Elliot refused to send him any, and told him that the 4,000 piastres had not been intended to raise the massi but to pay for information, etc. He stated also that the authority to act for the king in Calabria should have been vested not in the naval but in the military commander of the British forces. Sir Sidney returned to Palermo and borrowed £4,500, pledging his personal credit, to meet his obligations to the partisans and to continue the war.

  The troops had just returned to Sicily after the Battle of Maida when a new commander-in-chief arrived, General Fox, who had been appointed on the insistence of his brother, the Foreign Secretary. He came to Messina in H.M.S. Orion on 2nd July. Mr. Elliot hastened to welcome him and to lay before him his budget of complaints about Sir Sidney’s behaviour, only to find that the general had not only succeeded Stuart as commander of the troops, but also Elliot himself as British Representative at the Court of Naples. He had now to return to London with the prospect of having to explain both his opposition to Sir James Craig’s withdrawal from South Italy and to Sir Sidney’s advance into South Italy.

  The government were unwilling to employ him again, but in order not to offend his brother, Lord Minto, Governor-General of India, they appointed him Governor of the Leeward Islands and then of Madras. Had he stuck to his original contention that the British should not have withdrawn he would probably have found favour with Lord Castlereagh who returned to office in the following year and at once ordered General Fox to invade Italy. He was opposed to frittering away the British forces in expeditions to distant parts of the world. He favoured direct intervention in Europe provided it was in sufficient force and for a definite object.

  When Sir Sidney heard of General Fox’s arrival, he sent him a detailed report, written in the Pompée anchored in Policastro Bay, halfway between Sicily and Naples, informing him that the partisans were successfully resisting the efforts of the French to re-establish their government that had been overthrown by General Stuart’s victory at Maida, and that they were now disputing the mountain passes in the neighbouring province of Basilicata. He appealed for the continued co-operation of the army:

  If you agree with me [he wrote] that the ultimate defence of Sicily depends on keeping the theatre of war at this distance from it, you will send arms, ammunition, money, light artillery, and at least 1,000 troops of the line to this quarter.

  General Fox was a genial family man who had none of those talents which so greatly distinguished his brother. He had so much difficulty in making decisions, and so much difficulty in keeping to them once they were made, that he left all serious business to Sir John Moore, his very able second-in-command. Sir John distrusted Sir Sidney, the partisans (‘the lowest type of scoundrels’) and the court at Palermo almost equally. He believed in the British Army. He wanted to use it to take violent possession of Sicily, throw out the Neapolitan Government, and defend the island against all-comers; and he spoke of shipping the ambitious queen off to Trieste. Acting on his advice, General Fox ordered that no more arms or ammunition were to be supplied to the partisans, and he withdrew his few scattered detachments from the mainland. In this decision he had the support of his officers, most of whom looked upon the partisans only as lawless bandits, not as what they might have been if properly led — which showed clearly enough that they would have been incapable of forming an alliance with the ferocious Djezzar to defeat Napoleon at Acre.

  Sir Sidney’s Commanding Officer, Lord Collingwood, took an equally unfavourable view of his activities. He read the dispatches with considerable disapproval: he thought that soldiers should be soldiers, statesmen statesmen, and sailors sailors, and that any encroachment on each other’s duties ‘would necessarily cause uneasiness somewhere which is detrimental to the service’. He objected therefore to Sir Sidney’s assumption of vice-regal powers in Calabria, and he objected also to his bringing succour to the beleaguered fortress of Gaeta. He reported to the First Lord of the Admiralty that the French kept a force there just sufficient to make it a drain to carry off the resources of Sicily. In this he was entirely wrong: the Neapolitan garrison of Gaeta, according to Mr. Elliot, consisted of a very few regular troops; the rest were raw recruits and galley slaves to whom the Prince of Hesse had given their freedom, and they were pinning down 16,000 French troops.

  Collingwood wrote to Rear-Admiral Purvis, ‘Sir Sidney is a great sol
dier but I am afraid the ships and their service is not so much the object of his regard as the Prince of Hesse’s breach-bastion.’ Capri, he thought, might be very useful in the summer months, but the garrison and the inhabitants, numbering 2,000, would have to be victualled in the winter. The action at Maida he called a most gallant thing,

  but, as we could not keep an army there, I am afraid the sufferings of the Calabrians will be increased by our having made them take a part against their enemy, which we are not in a position to maintain.

  He was still blockading Cadiz and a persistent east wind distressed him. He became more and more irritated with his irrepressible subordinate. He wrote more intimately to his brother:

  I am sadly off with this Sir S. Smith at Sicily; the man’s head is full of strange vapours and I am convinced Lord Barham sent him here to be clear of tormentor, but he annoys me more than the French or Spanish fleet, and the squadron he has is going to ruin.

  He noted with relief that General Fox was taking over the command in Sicily.

  When Mr. Elliot’s complaints reached London, no one troubled to enquire whether he had fairly and truly represented the circumstances, or whether Sir Sidney’s operations had been successful, or what would happen to the partisans if he was not supported. The only questions that mattered were the technical ones: had he or had he not accepted a commission from the Government of Sicily without first obtaining the sanction of the British Minister there? And had he or had he not issued and acted under the proclamation of that court? Copies of the proclamation were before the Cabinet to prove that he had, and so he was ordered to be reprimanded and removed from his command. The qualities that made him a great leader of irregular troops — his flair for adventure, his habit of making quick decisions, his complete lack of national prejudices, his full acceptance of personal responsibility, and his disregard for red tape — were the same qualities that infuriated those in authority.

  He was, and always would be, incomprehensible to those who were living in the past, unaware that times had changed. And he was almost alone in seeing that new ways had to be found to counter the new methods of waging war that Napoleon was using. He wrote to Collingwood:

  I thus take my leave of this service, with the conscious certainty that I have acted from the purest motives for the common cause against the cruel and rapacious foe we have to do with...

  The Partisans, even when left without direction or support, were still formidable enemies. No Frenchman was safe from their guerrilla tactics unless moving in strong formation, and when the bands were cornered they disappeared and became indistinguishable from the rest of the inhabitants. Sir Sidney had been planning to finally relieve Gaeta by raising the country behind the French besieging army and cutting its communications with Naples. Unhappily for his plans, and for his cause, the Prince of Hesse was wounded in the head, dissension broke out among the garrison, and the fortress after its long resistance was tamely surrendered.

  Other places were still strongly held, however, including Reggio, and Scilla which Napoleon called the most important point in the world because it was the key to Sicily, and the capture of Sicily would change the face of the Mediterranean. He warned Joseph that he must regain the initiative; and so a large French army under Marshal Masséna, with heavy artillery, re-entered Calabria. It is brutal campaigning country, but in six months of slow but inexorable progress against fanatical resistance he regained all the territory Reynier had lost. The British and Neapolitan garrisons of Reggio and Scilla surrendered, and the French once again established themselves on the shores of the Straits of Messina opposite Sicily.

  By this time the campaign had degenerated into a war of mutual extermination. The greatest cruelty was practised on both sides. The partisans gave no quarter; and when Napoleon was informed that the town of Lauria had been pillaged and burnt by his troops, and that the inhabitants, men, women and children, had been shot down as they attempted to escape from the flames, he told Joseph to order that all the rebellious villages near Euphemia, where the British had landed, should suffer the same fate. To these ignorant mountaineers it was more apparent that the invaders were destroying their crops, executing their young men and burning their villages, than that they were doing it in the name of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. According to Napoleon, the insurrection would not have been confined to Calabria; it would have spread northwards if the English had not been afraid to advance. Rather than let them establish a foothold and an active theatre of war on the mainland of Europe, he was prepared to go in person with large reinforcements to Joseph’s assistance.

  The Battle of Maida caused a sensation in England. There was much to be learned from it. It was a perfect demonstration of the correct use of sea power carrying a land force to the place at which it could strike effectively, and giving it close support in case it should be necessary for it to re-embark. Besides this, the ships hovering in the straits influenced Reynier to leave his strong position and advance. He thought that two forces were being landed, so he was in a hurry to defeat one before having to deal with the other. A strong body of reinforcements that he was expecting to join him was held in the neighbourhood of the straits to oppose this second landing which didn’t take place, and when it finally set out it was too late for the battle. It left the garrisons of Reggio and Scilla so weak that they were easily taken by the British a few days later.

  The value of partisans co-operating with regular troops was clearly demonstrated also. Not only was their infiltration behind him the main reason for Reynier’s fatal decision to risk a frontal attack on the British line, but it was through them that he lost the whole country as the result of one defeat. The actual lighting showed that the French method of attacking in columns, that had always cut through the Austrian armies, could be defeated by an extended line of steady troops who were trained marksmen. Wellington studied this battle and decided that, unless the French changed their tactics, he could beat Napoleon.

  Chapter Nineteen – The Second Chance

  All through King Joseph’s ineffectual attempts to consolidate his power in Calabria and gain possession of Sicily he had been greatly worried by Sir Sidney’s tactics, by his raids on outlying fortresses and by his proclamations addressed to the partisans. Napoleon repeatedly advised him to ignore his antagonist, to talk of him as little as possible, for he was a chatterer and a deceiver, and that he must press on with the invasion of Sicily. But the British occupation of Capri in full view of his palace windows was a constant reminder of his helplessness to defend even his own coastline.

  For Napoleon Sir Sidney was in fact a great deal more than a chatterer and a deceiver: in his superstitious mind the name of the man who had wrecked his most cherished dream had become an omen of misfortune. In those days the Napoleonic mystique didn’t work in Britain, and particularly not in the Royal Navy. The tremendous legend of his invincibility, so painstakingly built up and so effective against his continental enemies, meant nothing to these irreverent islanders, and Sir Sidney was the representative Englishman to whom he was most acutely sensitive. The letter written on the window shutter had appeared in the Paris newspapers shortly after his return from Egypt, before he had seized power and abolished the freedom of the press. The prophecy that he would one day be imprisoned in the Temple also was not at all what he wanted the people to be reading at a time when he was plotting to overthrow the established government.

  Sir Sidney understood him better than most Englishmen did, and had been able again and again to forecast correctly, and warn ministers, what he would do: that he would invade Egypt, that he would abandon the Army of Egypt, that he would make a bid for supreme power in France which, if it succeeded, would usher in an era of militarism and warfare, for he would attempt to dominate the world. On 12th February, 1806, when he was about to sail from Plymouth in the Pompée to take command of the inshore squadron in Italian waters, he had written to his old friend William Windham, then Secretary for War in the Grenville administration, warning
him that Napoleon’s old ambition to capture Constantinople and the overland route to India would be re-awakened by his recent conquests in eastern Europe, and particularly by his occupation of Venice, the ancient Queen of the East.

  This appears to be precisely what happened. Ever since the capitulation of his Army of Egypt he had laboured assiduously to regain the influence that France had lost at the Sublime Porte, and to win the friendship of Sultan Selim, calling upon him to chase out the traitors — by which he meant the British and Russians — and to entrust himself to his true friends — by which he meant the French. But at the same time he was planning the destruction and dismemberment of Selim’s empire. He sent an accomplished diplomat, General Sebastiani, to represent him at Constantinople together with a strong contingent of artillerymen and engineers.

  When the Treaty of Presburg gave him Dalmatia, along the eastern shore of the Adriatic, he gained a common frontier with the Turkish Empire and with it a possible land route to Constantinople that could not be blocked by the British fleet. He formed the Army of Dalmatia, under General Marmont, which was to be ready to thrust eastwards across the mountains when the time was ripe. Major de Tromelin, following his curiously mixed-up destiny, served in this army. He earned high praise from Marmont for drilling a mutinous regiment of Croats into a disciplined force and he was also employed on missions to Turkey, and on surveying and mapping the frontier between Dalmatia and the Turkish dominions in preparation for the invasion. Napoleon refused to confirm his promotion to colonel on the grounds that his advancement was ‘too rapid for Sidney Smith’s aide-de-camp’.

  The British Government had again sent to Constantinople an ambassador who was totally ignorant of Turkey and the Levant, Mr. Charles Arbuthnot. He viewed with alarm the growth of French influence at the Porte. The Russians, equally alarmed, withdrew their ambassador and occupied the provinces of Moldavia and Walachia as a pledge that the terms of their Treaty of Friendship with Turkey would be observed. Mr. Arbuthnot made common cause with them. He wrote to London, to Lord Collingwood, and to Sir Sidney, saying that the presence of a British naval force was indispensable because ‘the Turks feared nothing but our fleets’. He also requested a frigate for his personal use.