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

by Peter Shankland

  He had many friends in Paris besides General de Tromelin, and Madame de Tromelin whose letters he had taken with him when he escaped from the Temple, and still treasured. The general, after a period in retirement, was again forgiven by the Bourbon Government; he became Inspector General and a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour. The Savants did not forget that Sir Sidney had protected them at Alexandria at the risk of compromising himself with his commanding officer. When the records he had taken care of for them were published they presented him with one of the first copies to issue from the press, with a letter of thanks and appreciation. He was also on good terms with many of the officers against whom he had fought. He was, as Admiral Hotham remarked, perhaps the best English-Frenchman that ever lived.

  He continued his efforts to form an international force to end North African piracy and slavery. The Duke of Wellington, who was British Ambassador in Paris, quickly tired of his importunity: ‘Of all the men whom I ever knew who have any reputation,’ he said to John Croker, Secretary to the Admiralty, ‘the man who least deserves it is Sir Sidney Smith. During my embassy at Paris (where he was living to avoid his creditors in England) I saw a good deal of him, and had eternal projects from him as long as I would listen to them. At first, out of deference to his name and reputation, I attended to him, but I soon found he was a mere vapouriser. I cannot believe that a man so silly in all other affairs can be a good naval officer.’

  His plan, however, to use an amphibious force to pursue the Corsairs both by land and by sea, was not silly. It was indeed the answer to the problem. He had a big following in the navy, at least among the younger officers, but no one in authority would listen. He was ridiculed for his efforts instead of being honoured as one of the benefactors of humanity. There was a noisy bombardment of Algiers in 1816 by Lord Exmouth in command of a British and Dutch fleet, as a result of which the Dey released his Christian slaves and agreed to give up capturing and enslaving Christians — but as soon as the ships sailed away the nefarious and lucrative trade began again, and it was allowed to continue until the French landed in North Africa in 1830.

  Croker entirely sympathised with the Duke. He explained that the seamen on the Board of the Admiralty were averse to employing Sir Sidney, ‘for certainly he was not what is called a sailor’; and he quoted, by way of explanation, a remark made to him by old Admiral Curtis: ‘My dear friend, beware of Heroes — the more you come to know them, the less you will think of them.’

  When Napoleon stood on the deck of H.M.S. Northumberland as she was drawing near to St. Helena, on 17th October, 1815, and gazed at the great barren cliffs of his future home, his thoughts were not with the 2 million Frenchmen he had left dead on his battlefields, nor with the 60,000 men who had died as the result of his return from Elba; he was thinking of that unlucky night in Egypt when, by the light of a single candle, he had studied the newspapers sent to him by Sir Sidney Smith that had caused him to take the momentous decision to return to France.

  ‘I should have done better to remain in Egypt,’ he said to General Gourgaud who was standing beside him, ‘by now I should have been Emperor of all the East.’ And he told the Comte de las Cases, ‘If St. Jean d’Acre had yielded to the French, a great revolution would have taken place in the East. I would have founded a great empire there, and the destinies of France would have been left to assume other forms.’

  During his long captivity he frequently referred to his lost Empire of the East, and he took a more lenient view of the man who had thwarted him, and whom he had frequently abused. ‘I’m sorry I spoke ill of Smith,’ he said to Las Cases. ‘They tell me he’s a good fellow. His government doesn’t appreciate his services in Egypt and Syria.’

  He had nothing to do now but to create the Napoleonic Legend, and to think up altruistic motives for his career of conquest, and explanations for past actions, such as the massacre at Jaffa, which at the time had not appeared to him to require any. What was important, now that he could no longer play a part in the real world, was that his career was becoming a myth, and the facts had to be adjusted to suit it, so that the myth, and not the reality, should survive: it drew its strength from the pre-Christian instinct for hero worship, for the glorification of the slaughterers and conquerors of mankind, of the Caesars and Alexanders whom, in the words of Albert Camus, ‘our educators are cold-hearted enough to teach us to admire’. Thus the instinct for hero worship, latent in all men, is kept alive and ready to break out again into the modern world.

  Napoleon was helped in his re-writing of history by Las Cases, and by O’Meara, the Surgeon of the Bellerophon, who had accompanied him to St. Helena when his own surgeon refused to go.

  Las Cases was a royalist naval officer who had escaped to England in 1792: he supported himself in London by teaching, and by publishing an historical atlas. In August 1799 he learned that his cousin, Henriette de Kergariou, was living alone in Brittany where civil war was raging, and that her two brothers had died in the massacre of royalist prisoners at Quiberon. He landed secretly in France and married her. The romance lasted three weeks; he left her pregnant and returned to London. During the Peace of Amiens he took advantage of the amnesty and settled alone in Paris, but he took, at first, no part in public affairs. Then, after Ulm and Austerlitz, he became Napoleon’s devoted servant: he felt that these brilliant victories had effaced some of the shameful events of the Revolution.

  He explained his conversion thus: ‘I was really a stranger in France, dissatisfied, and even disaffected. Then the Empire was proclaimed. It was a great event. It was then that I told myself my own customs, my own prejudices, my own principles, had triumphed. The only difference was in the person of the sovereign...I was conquered by glory. I admired, I recognised, I loved, Napoleon, and I became French to the point of fanaticism.’ His was quite a typical response — in strange contrast to that of the republican, Lucien Bonaparte, who accused Napoleon of having absorbed their public liberties in the rays of his military glory.

  Las Cases obtained government appointments and preferments through his old friend Decrès, Minister of the Marine, and through the Empress Josephine whom he had known when he was a young cadet in Martinique. At St. Helena he was hated by General Gourgaud, the least unreliable of the memorialists who noted:

  Las Cases is a simple intriguer, a coward, a hypocrite, who has done nothing but foolish things, exciting the Emperor to create illusions about everything.

  Gourgaud was a grumbler, and jealous, but his memoirs have a ring of truth that nothing else has that emanated from St. Helena at that time.

  O’Meara, the best loved and probably the least reliable of the memorialists, quotes Napoleon as follows:

  Sidney Smith is a brave officer. He displayed considerable ability in the treaty for the evacuation of Egypt by the French. He took advantage of the discontent which he found to prevail amongst the French troops, at being so long away from France, and other circumstances. He also manifested great honour in sending immediately to Kléber the refusal of Lord Keith to ratify the treaty, which saved the French army. If he had kept it a secret for seven or eight days longer, Cairo would have been given up to the Turks, and the French army necessarily obliged to surrender to the English. He also showed great humanity and honour in all his proceedings towards the French who fell into his hands. He landed at Havre for some sottise of a bet he had made; according to some, to go to the theatre; others said it was for espionage. However that may be, he was arrested and confined to the Temple as a spy; and at one time it was intended to try, and execute him. Shortly after I returned from Italy, he wrote to me from his prison, to request that I should intercede for him; but under the circumstances in which he was taken I could do nothing for him. He is active, intelligent, intriguing, and indefatigable; but I believe he is half mad. (messo pazzo).

  O’Meara asked him if Sir Sidney had not displayed great talent and bravery at Acre. Napoleon replied, ‘Yes, the chief cause of the failure there was that he took all my batterin
g train, which was on board several small vessels. Had it not been for that, I would have taken Acre in spite of him. He behaved very bravely, and was well seconded by Phélippeaux, a Frenchman of talent, who had studied with me as an engineer. There was a Major Douglas also who behaved very gallantly. The acquisition of five or six hundred seamen as cannoneers was a great advantage to the Turks, whose spirits they revived, and whom they showed how to defend the fortress. But he committed a great fault in making sorties, which cost the lives of two or three hundred brave fellows, without the possibility of success. For it was impossible that he should succeed against the number of French who were before Acre. I would lay a wager that he lost half his crew in them. He dispersed proclamations amongst my troops, which certainly shook some of them, and I, in consequence, published an order stating that he was mad, and forbidding all communication with him. Some days after, he sent, by means of a flag of truce, a lieutenant or a midshipman with a letter containing a challenge to meet me at some place he pointed out, in order to fight a duel. I laughed at this, and sent him back an intimation that when he brought Marlborough to fight me, I would meet him. Notwithstanding this, I like the character of the man.’

  Warden, the surgeon of the Northumberland, who spent some time at St. Helena, quotes him thus, on the subject of Jaffa:

  We carried the place, and it required all my efforts and influence to restrain the fury of the enraged soldiers. At length I succeeded, and night closed the sanguinary scene. At dawn of the following morning, a report was brought me that five hundred men, chiefly Naplousians, who had lately formed part of the garrison of El Arish, and to whom I had a few days before given liberty on condition that they should return to their homes, were actually found among the prisoners. On this fact being indubitably ascertained, I ordered the five hundred men to be drawn out and instantly shot.

  Warden continues:

  His anxiety appeared to be extreme, that I should be satisfied of the truth of every part of his narrative, and he continually interrupted it by asking me if I perfectly comprehended him.

  Commenting on this passage to O’Meara, Napoleon said the men were not Naplousians but Maugrabins from near Algiers, and in another place he gives the number supposed to have been identified as having been part of the garrison of El Arish as 1,000 or 1,200. The other memorialists of St. Helena give a variety of excuses for the massacre, none of which bear examination. In his dispatch to the Directory immediately after the event, (13th March, 1799), he wrote:

  At five o’clock we were masters of the town which for twenty-four hours was given up to pillage and to all the horrors of war which have never appeared to me so hideous. 4,000 of Djezzar’s troops were put to the sword. There were 800 gunners; a part of the inhabitants has been massacred.

  The Times had opened a campaign for the court martial of Napoleon for the murder of Captain Wright. ‘They accuse me of the death of a poor little post captain,’ he commented, as if the poor little post captain were beneath his notice. And to Warden ‘he again and again most solemnly asserted that Captain Wright died in the Temple by his own hand, as described in the Moniteur, and at a much earlier period than has been generally believed’. This statement accorded neither with the meticulously kept prison records, nor with the testimony of the witnesses, nor with his own correspondence.

  Sir Sidney carried out an investigation in Paris which was made difficult by the destruction of the Temple, and by the fact that Fouché had destroyed nearly all the Secret Police records. He established that suicide could be ruled out because of the position in which Wright’s body was found, and because his head had been nearly severed from his body, but he was not able to establish upon whose orders he had been done to death. He published a statement saying so, but he made no secret of his opinion that Napoleon was responsible. It might, however, have been Fouché’s work, though Napoleon maintained that he wouldn’t have dared to do it; and he objected to an epitaph that Sir Sidney wrote upon Wright: ‘For in it,’ he said, ‘he throws out insinuations, or at least leaves room to suppose, that he was secretly despatched, although he does not dare to say it openly. After having made every search and enquiry in his power, after having exhausted all his means in endeavouring to prove that he was murdered, after having had an opportunity of examining the gaolers and turnkeys, and finding that nothing of the kind had happened, he ought, like a man of honour, to have openly declared that there was no proof to admit of such an accusation, instead of making insinuations, especially when his old enemy, against whom he had so often fought, was in the hands of his countrymen...However, notwithstanding that Sidney Smith has ill-treated me, I should still have pleasure in seeing him. I should like to receive that galliard. He has certain good qualities, and as an old enemy I should like to see him.’

  He harboured no resentment for Colonel Phélippeaux either, whose friendship for Sir Sidney and whose co-operation at Acre had withstood the onslaught of his hitherto all-conquering army. ‘He was a man of about your size and build,’ he remarked to Las Cases who answered, ‘Sire, there was an even closer affinity; we were intimate and inseparable friends at the military school. On his way through London with Sir Sidney Smith, whom he had just rescued from the Temple, he enquired for me everywhere; I missed him at his lodgings by barely half-an-hour. I should probably have gone with him. I was doing nothing at the time; the prospect of adventure would have attracted me, and what a new pattern that would have been in my destiny!’

  ‘It is because I am aware of the part that chance plays in our political decisions,’ the Emperor replied, ‘that I was always without prejudice and very indulgent about the side anyone had taken in our convulsions. For a man to be a good Frenchman, or to wish to become one, was all that I asked.’

  And he compared, Las Cases says, the confusion of their disturbances, to night battles in which one often strikes one’s neighbour instead of one’s enemy, but when day breaks order is re-established, everything becomes clear, and all is forgiven.

  Note on Sir Sidney Smith’s Detractors

  There has been a tendency among historians to underrate Sir Sidney Smith and to take the statements of his detractors at their face value without examining them. To give only a few examples:

  Captain A. T. Mahan states that Sir Sidney acted at El Arish ‘in direct contravention of the Treaty of Friendship with Turkey.’ This is entirely untrue. This suggestion was put forward by Grenville at the time and immediately refuted. Then Mahan, unaware, evidently, of the Cabinet’s duplicity about his instructions, abuses him for acting contrary to the orders of his commanding officer, Lord Nelson. The point is that Sir Sidney had orders from the Cabinet also, and from Lord Elgin, that had higher authority than Nelson’s. Mahan’s complete misunderstanding of the situation leads him to say that he is puzzled by the wisdom and modesty that Sir Sidney gave proof of at Acre, so greatly at variance with the opinions of his detractors. Instead of coming to the obvious conclusion that his detractors were wrong, he suggests that ‘at this time Smith had received some severe snubbings, which, administered by men of the standing of St. Vincent and Nelson, could not be disregarded, and may have had a wholesomely sobering effect.’ He thus gives St. Vincent and Nelson credit even for Sir Sidney’s wisdom and modesty! In fact these ‘severe snubbings’ did not reach Sir Sidney until after he had defeated Napoleon at Acre.

  Rear-Admiral Richmond, editor of Vol. IV of the Spencer Papers for the Navy Records Society, follows Mahan in condemning Sir Sidney for disobeying Nelson and for ‘disregarding the terms of the Treaty with Turkey.’ He also contrives, in a footnote to a letter from Dundas, to give the impression that he is saying he is ashamed of the Convention of El Arish: he is actually saying that he is ashamed of the Cabinet decision that wrecked it. Richmond adds that the more people came to know Sir Sidney the less they thought of him — again the opposite of the truth: his escape from the Temple, his defeat of Bonaparte, were made possible by the devotion of his friends. Both Lord Nelson and Marshal Junot who began
by disliking him changed their minds when they knew him better and expressed the greatest admiration for him. Even Napoleon regretted that he had spoken ill of him, and said that the British Government didn’t appreciate his services.

  David Bonner Smith, editing the St. Vincent Papers for the Navy Records Society, states, ‘Abercromby and Keith were sent up the Mediterranean to clear up the muddle created by Sir Sidney Smith in Egypt.’ The idea of Keith being sent to clear up the muddle created by Sir Sidney is simply outrageous, considering that it was Keith himself, by the fearful blunder of his offensive letter to Kléber who had just wrecked all Sir Sidney’s good work and caused the war to break out again.

  J. Holland Rose, referring to the operations on the mainland of Italy, says that General Stuart’s advance after the Battle of Maida was stopped by Sir Sidney’s armed bands: this is from Elliot’s confidential, and untruthful, letter to the Foreign Secretary, which, in its turn, seems to be based on a letter to him from General Stuart saying that it was the effects of the King’s decree appointing Sir Sidney to the Viceroyalty which determined him to break off the pursuit of Reynier. Stuart wasn’t telling the truth either and, if he had been, it would have been his own pique, and not the armed bands, that had stopped the pursuit.

  J. W. Fortesque, in British Statesmen of the Great War, 1793-1814, calls Sir Sidney a brilliant imposter who chose his time cunningly for approaching Ministers and came to them stuffed with facts, figures and pledges one and all of them fallacious.’ There is nothing in the evidence to support this sweeping assertion. In reading Fortesque’s strictures on naval officers one should bear in mind his statement in the opening chapter of his book, that he only claimed to have carried out research in one branch of history — the military.