by Max Adams
The only great mortification I suffered was not going with Adm Nelson. He [St Vincent] knew our friendship; for many, many years we had served together, lived together, and all that ever happened to us strengthened the bond of our amity, but my going would have interfered with the aggrandisement of a favourite to whom I was senior, and so he sent me out of the way when the detachment was to be made.47
This letter was written in December 1798 at Spithead, where Collingwood was in hopes that he might finally be allowed to go home for a spell of leave. Excellent, at sea more or less continuously since 1795, needed urgent repairs, and Collingwood thought he might be paid off. Despite his jealousy of the glory of the Nile, Collingwood had already written to his friend offering him his congratulations, unable, he said, ‘to express my joy … for the complete and glorious victory you have obtained over the French’.48 Nelson did not return to England, as expected: he had been distracted in Naples. For Collingwood, so near home and yet still unable to leave Portsmouth, the agony grew worse as the days passed. He even declined the offer of another command, the 90-gun Atlas. All he could think of was Morpeth, Sarah, and his two girls, whom he had not seen for six years.
Finally, at the beginning of February 1799, he found himself at home again in the bosom of his family; and as if to paint the lily, in a general promotion timed for the anniversary of the battle of Cape St Vincent, Collingwood found himself a rear-admiral of the white.
7
Hope of peace alone
1799–1802
Spring 1799: Napoleon, stranded with his army in Egypt, was striking north through Palestine, about to be brought up with a round turn by Sir Sidney Smith at Acre. Nelson was in Palermo. He had been seduced by the fabulous dissoluteness of the Neapolitan court and the charms of the British Ambassador’s wife, evacuating them from Naples to Sicily. St Vincent was too ill to command at sea and lay at Gibraltar, dispensing orders to the fleet. Collingwood was in the garden at Morpeth, contemplating his long-neglected cabbage patch.
Almost delirious with joy, at the same time he had an eye and half of his soul turned towards the sea. He was delighted with his daughters, with his wife, and with the genuine expressions of pleasure he encountered everywhere at his promotion.
I have spent a month of great happiness. Every body and every object about me contributes to it. My Sarah is all that is excellent in woman, my girls as sweet children as ever were. They are pretty creatures and appear to me to have the greatest affection for each other, and for their mother, and to possess tempers that promise them a fair share of happiness, so that if this great promotion which the King has made in the navy should exclude me from serving at sea, and check my pursuit of professional credit, I have as many comforts, and sources of rational happiness, to resort to as any person. But I shall never lose sight of the duty I owe to my country.1
Until such time as his country called on him again, Collingwood kept himself busy making plans for the house and the garden. He had designs for the girls’ education, too: French, geometry, history, and serious literature – no frivolities for the Misses Collingwood. But his first duty was to the service, and it was a matter of weeks rather than months before he was itching to be back in action. As always he kept a close eye on political and military developments, via newspapers and letters from fellow officers and friends. He had always had strong views on the enemy; he also had a fair idea of their future strategy for the war, foreshadowing Bonaparte’s Continental System:
When I consider the impetuosity of the French armies, the ambition of their government, and the impotence of the nations they are about to attack, I am sick with abhorrence of them. That under the mask of friendship to mankind [they] would subject them to the most degrading slavery that ever the human species groaned under … They have tried us in battle, and have failed … It is only left for them to make war on our finances.2
Sarah’s mixed feelings at this time cannot be better expressed than by those of Jane Austen’s fictional Anne Elliot: ‘She gloried in being a sailor’s wife, but she must pay the tax of quick alarm for belonging to that profession …’3 Almost none of Sarah’s letters to her husband survive, so we do not know how she expressed her sense of isolation to him. The first of her correspondence that does survive is from the following year, when a series of letters between her and Miss Mary Woodman began. By that time Collingwood was at sea again, and Sarah was once more paying her taxes.
In the meantime the Collingwoods filled their lives with visits to family and friends; Cuthbert went to London briefly to discuss the possibility of service, but was offered nothing. He had met the Queen, though, at one of Their Majesties’ famous Drawing Rooms. Unlike Nelson, dazzled by the aura of royalty, Collingwood was amused but unimpressed by the experience:
It was an entertaining sight, to so new a courtier, to observe the pleasure that sprang into the countenances of all, when Her Majesty was graciously pleased to repeat to them a few words which were not intended to have any meaning; for the great art of the courtly manner seems to be to smile on all, to speak of all, and yet leave no trace of meaning in what is said.4
A rear-admiral of the white, whatever his service pedigree, was in his own way an unfortunate junior.5 Not only was he most unlikely to be given an independent command, but he must also surrender the sailing of his ship to a flag captain. But the thought of being ashore when there was action afoot was no easier to bear in his fifty-first year than it had been in his twenty-fourth when he and Wilfred had been consigned to the Portsmouth guard ship. One awful possibility was that he might be offered a shore command, the worst of both worlds. ‘I have no desire to command in a port,’ he wrote, ‘except at Morpeth, where I am only second.’6 He consoled himself with corresponding on the subject of Frenchmen and domestic bliss:
I hope ere long [the Arch Duke of Austria] will make them hide their heads and make the name of Frenchmen as contemptible to all men as it has ever been detestable to me. In their best days they were ever a set of fawning, dancing, impious hypocrites. Sarah wou’d add a few lines to her aunt but she says her fingers ache with her work. She is making a new cover for her sofa against her friends come – always industrious.7
In May Collingwood’s political sensitivities were tested when he and Sarah dined with some of their Morpeth neighbours, who were very ‘gay and good humour’d’, but:
When I tell you the dining room where we dined yesterday was ornamented with pictures of Tom Paine and Horn Tooke,8 you will conclude we have strange characters amongst us. It was at young Burdon’s, the son of him who lives at Newcastle; he was bred at Cambridge and is a philosopher.9
Collingwood was making light of an extremely tense political climate. Pitt was about to complete the Second Coalition against France, comprising Britain, Russia, Austria, Portugal, Turkey and the Two Sicilies, but it was a fragile alliance, and visibly so. A strong peace party continued to pressurise the King and his cabinet as the National Debt rose to dangerous levels, and the failure of the 1799 harvest would create even greater tensions. Parliament was about to pass the Combination Act, giving magistrates the right to ban political associations of workers.
Compared to France, Britain still had an extraordinarily free press. Nevertheless, government was sufficiently concerned to have its agents monitoring clubs and meeting places. In the event, it was the Irish Question which would, within two years, see Pitt’s administration fall. Ireland could not be treated separately from the war with France, because it had been and still was French policy to incite uprising there. The failed rebellion and French invasion of 1798 that had led to the suicide of Wolf Tone was followed by an Act of Union with the British crown, its imposition softened with bribes and with Pitt’s promise of Catholic emancipation. At this last, religious and moral fence, the ever-conservative George III put his royal foot down, and Pitt was replaced by Henry Addington. The stress precipitated a new outbreak of the King’s illness.
This crisis was still in the future when, in June 1799
, three months after coming home, Collingwood found himself at sea again, hoisting his admiral’s pennant in Triumph, an ill-named, old-fashioned 74-gun two-decker10 that was so slow the rest of the fleet kept having to wait for her to catch up. As before, he found the Channel fleet in a deplorable state. To begin with, St Vincent’s absence in Gibraltar meant that his iron hand had loosened its grip on discipline in the fleet. Rapid expansion of the navy had effected a corresponding decline in skill and seamanship. There were so many ‘unqualified, ignorant people’11 in the service that accidents were frequent and inevitable. As for Collingwood’s own ship:
I have a captain here [Stephens], a very novice in the conduct of fleets or ships. When I joined her I found she had been twice ashore, and once on fire, in the three months he had commanded her, and they were then expecting that the ships company should mutiny every day. I never saw men more orderly, or who seem better disposed, but I suppose they took liberties when they found they might, and I am afraid there are a great many ships where the reins of discipline are held very loosely, the effect of a long war and an overgrown navy.12
Summer was spent vainly chasing after the Brest fleet, which had been allowed to get out by the incompetence of the blockading squadron, and was now at large in the Mediterranean. Collingwood, sailing under Lord Keith’s command, nearly caught up with them in Menorca, which Keith thought they were aiming to retake. But they were not there. Nelson, whom Keith had requested to cover the island from Sicily, refused to come out: a direct dereliction of duty somewhat less glorious than his later problem with a telescope.
Nelson has often been held up as a paradigm of the English naval officer’s devotion to duty. In fact, his devotion was to an older naval concept: that of honour and royal service. It was, ironically, Collingwood, a man older than Nelson by half a generation, who embodied the concept of selfless duty which was to become so fashionable in the first half of the nineteenth century. Nelson may have become infatuated with Emma Hamilton, but he had been equally seduced by the aura of the Bourbon royal family: King Ferdinand and Queen Maria Carolina (sister of the decapitated Marie Antoinette). Even among eighteenth-century royalty they made a pretty unattractive pair, as Collingwood later observed at first hand: lazy, manipulative, self-obsessed and wallowing in personal wealth. Nevertheless, they allowed or persuaded Nelson at first and second hand to believe that his duty was to protect the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies from invasion by the French. His real duty, clearly, was to obey the orders of his senior officer, in this case Lord Keith. But his sense of honour dictated what he thought was a nobler course of action. So for much of 1799 he stayed in Palermo, his ships idle, while his friends shook their heads at such crapulous indulgence.
By the time Keith’s fleet caught up with the French they were back in the safety of Brest harbour, and the fleet returned to Torbay with its tail between its legs. Collingwood blamed Keith for his slowness and indecision. There was worse news waiting. An Anglo-Russian campaign in the Low Countries under Frederick Duke of York, King George’s unfairly maligned second son, had failed. Napoleon had defeated a Turkish army at Aboukir, embarked on a ship and, undetected, returned to France to find the French economy and the Directory in a state of collapse. In November, on 18 Brumaire, he staged a coup d’état in Paris and was declared First Consul. Collingwood wrote from Triumph, in which he was blockading Brest, in December:
I do not know how to form any judgement of its consequences. It appears to me but as another scene in the tragic farce they have been acting for so many years, where Knave succeeds to Knave … Where is now the August Directory who was to give law to the nations of Europe, and the Ancients, that bright constellation of wisdom? – a set of villains who have halloo’d the poor misled multitude to robbery, plunder and murder, all vanished in a moment, their power sunk into the dust by Gipsey Bonaparte’s Hocus Pocus.13
On Christmas Eve 1799 Collingwood was back in Plymouth, recovering from the storms and hardship of the Brest blockade. It was the worst station to be posted to: ships constantly battled with westerly gales that forever drove them on to France’s dangerous coast; otherwise, easterly winds drove them off station and allowed the French fleet to escape. Fog was an additional menace to be dealt with, but one which was hardly appreciated by a public and a City thirsting for good news. The blockade might win the war, but it made for poor headlines. Collingwood’s hopes rested on the First Lord, Lord Bridport, allowing him to come up to Portsmouth so Sarah might join him in the New Year; he thought rumours of peace proposals might soon come to fruition:
Then I will plant my cabbages again, and prune my goosberry trees, cultivate roses, and twist the woodbine through the hawthorn hedge …14
There was no peace yet, though. Collingwood was briefly seduced, like many others, into believing Bonaparte would now take a more conciliatory line and, needing even more than Britain to repair his disastrous finances, sue for peace:
Bonaparte seems more moderate and reasonable, both in his acts and language, than any of the ruling factions in France hitherto have been. Whenever his powers are generally acknowledged by the French nation monarchy is established in his person with another name, but not less absolute than in the reigns of their former kings, with a more formidable army at his command and the Councils subject to his nod. Will the people (versatile as they are) submit to this usurpation after all the clamour they have been making for so many years about Republicanism and liberty and equality, and wading through such scenes of blood and devastation after a phantom? And if they resist, another week may produce another constitution and a new class to treat with.15
At Christmas King George received a letter from Napoleon: ‘Why should the two most enlightened countries in Europe … go on sacrificing their trade, their prosperity, and their domestic happiness to false ideas of grandeur?’ wrote the First Consul.16 The King had his Foreign Secretary, Grenville, reply not to Napoleon but to Talleyrand, demanding the restoration of the French monarchy.
In fact secret negotiations dragged on through the year, while both England and France sought to make strategic gains to be used as bargaining tools. Both countries were in the grip of a severe winter. In London the first soup kitchens were opened to relieve the hungry poor. Now came intelligence that the French had assembled a large force at Brest and were in contemplation of a major expedition: to Ireland, in Collingwood’s view. So Collingwood and the Channel fleet returned to the blockade. British strategy had now changed entirely from Howe’s day six years before, when the fleet stayed in port to preserve its ships and stores. An active, total blockade was now recognised as the only bar to French attacks on British convoys from the West Indies and America, and for preventing the arrival of France’s own convoys. It was a new type of warfare, as Collingwood had foreseen: a total war in which economic strangulation was the chief weapon on both sides.
There was a high price to pay for this strategy. Ships were lost, as much through incompetence as through the violence of the weather. There was also a mutiny aboard the Danae:
A shocking thing, but those who knew a good deal about her are not much surprised at it. There may exist a degree of violence when severity is substituted for discipline that is insupportable … The truth is, in this great extensive navy, we find a great many indolent, half-qualified people.17
Collingwood was neither indolent nor ill-qualified. Nor was he a brutal tyrannising commander. His punishment log in Triumph (he was one of very few commanders at this time who kept one) for the period May 1799 to January 1800 contains a single entry: twelve lashes to Richard Clay at Port Mahon for ‘contemptuous behaviour’.18
By now Collingwood (and with him Bounce) had transferred into Barfleur, the ship in which he had fought as flag captain at the Glorious First of June. She was much more to his liking: spacious and comfortable; or at least as comfortable as a ship on the Brest blockade could be. Throughout that summer the inglorious job of the fleet continued, and only in the inactivity of the French fleet and the di
sruption to her trade can its success be measured. More momentous events were taking place elsewhere. In May James Hadfield fired a shot at King George in the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. In June Napoleon won a crushing victory over Austria at Marengo, wrecking the hopes of the Second Coalition. At a less momentous level, in Newcastle three prisoners escaped from the gaol by climbing up its chimney flues. A fourth stuck fast and was ignominiously removed by the gaol keeper.19
Again, watching European events closely, Collingwood anticipated the future. He believed that, having effectively removed Austria from the military equation, Bonaparte would try to make peace with the Baltic states so he might concentrate his resources against Britain. Within a year France had coerced those powers into the Armed Neutrality which would lead to Nelson’s next triumph at Copenhagen. One small victory for Britain was the surrender of the French garrison on Malta, which was to remain from then on a key British possession through two more world wars.
In August, briefly, Collingwood shifted his flag to Neptune, another 98-gun second-rate, and only three years old. To his father-in-law he admitted how tired he and the entire fleet were with the war:
How the times are changed! Once, when officers met, the first question was, – What news of the French? Is there any prospect of their coming to sea? Now there is no solicitude on that subject, and the hope of peace alone engages the attention of every body.20
