This Little Britain

by Harry Bingham

  How come?

  The very first point to make is that while Monmouth’s action was remarkable, it wasn’t exactly unheard of. If we take all the single-ship encounters of the Seven Years War, including those where there was an approximate equality between the two opponents, the results are as follows:

  British ship (with number of guns) Men killed in action French ship (with number of guns) Men killed in action

  Monmouth, 64 30 Foudroyant, 80 134

  Bellona, 74 6 Courageux, 74 240

  Achilles, 60 2 Comte de St Florentin, 60 106

  Badger, 14 0 Escorte, 16 55

  Dorsetshire, 70 17 Raisonnable, 64 110

  Tartar, 28 4 Duc d’Aiguillon, 26 60

  Boreas, 28 1 Sirène, 32 80

  Lively, 20 2 Valeur, 20 38

  Trent, 20 1 Bien Aimé, 20 20

  Fortune, 18 1 Marie, 26 12

  What’s striking about this table is that the British ships didn’t merely overcome their opponents—they overwhelmed them. French casualties were four, ten, even eighty times greater than British losses. The creaking old Monmouth killed four and a half enemy men for every one of her own losses. The little Badger with her fourteen guns blasted the slightly larger Escorte into submission, without losing a single man in the process.

  Many of the most easily available explanations for this wild disparity of destructiveness are simply wrong. Were the French cowardly, simply not up for the fight? No. There is no evidence for the accusation, and it was certainly never made by British naval officers of the age, who had every respect for the fighting spirit of their adversary. Were the French ships simply worse built? No. British captains rated the enemy vessels as better built than their own. When the Foudroyant was patched up and taken into the Royal Navy, she was regarded as the best two-decker of her day. Or perhaps there were other technological differences to account for the difference? No—and if there had been, they would hardly have been of much benefit to the geriatric Monmouth.

  The difference appears to come down to simply this: the rate of fire of the two sides. It’s hard now to assess exactly how fast and hard each side was firing—presumably the officers of the Monmouth had better things to do than stand on deck with a notepad and stopwatch—but the scraps of evidence that we do have suggest that British ships were capable of much faster fire than their opponents. This answer, however, merely pushes the question one level farther down. Firing guns quickly is, to say the least, a rather obvious tactic to deploy. Why were the French so weak at it, the British so strong?

  The answer falls into two halves. The first part has to do with training, experience, discipline, leadership and ethos. The Royal Navy of Georgian Britain was not merely the largest organization in the world, it was also one of the most perfect. All the complex interlocking parts of manning, leadership, infrastructure, finance and the rest were as well engineered as it was possible for them to be. The continuing myths about the brutality of life in the Royal Navy are largely nonsense, at least when measured against the brutality of life that was general in those days. In many ways, the navy was the first truly modern organization of the industrial age. Since the purpose of that organization was efficacy in warfare, one shouldn’t be surprised that the Royal Navy outclassed its more lumbering opponents.*

  But the second part of the answer has to do with something deeper: the nature and purpose of the two rival navies. For the French, the navy was a means to an end. It was there to convey troops, support troops, allow troops to land. The French navy was never an end in itself, always the means to a military end. This outlook, of course, meant that the French navy never had the prestige, and sheer recruiting power, that the British navy enjoyed, but more significant still, it shaped French ideas on tactics too. On the whole, the French sought battle at a distance. Their aim was to fire high into the masts, spars and rigging of the enemy. The point was to disable the enemy, so that the French vessels could choose to avoid close action, manoeuvre or move in for the kill. This made perfect sense if the French purpose was to preserve their ships for the tactical support of the army. It would have made no more sense to jeopardize their ships unnecessarily than it would to have had their Catering Corps suddenly decide to charge the enemy, frying pans in hand.

  For the British it was never like that. The fundamental purpose of the Royal Navy was simply this: to prevent invasion. Given that overriding central purpose, then gunnery, tactics and ethos came to be about destroying enemy ships wherever and whenever possible. Every enemy ship destroyed was one less threat to domestic security. Duelling at a distance made no sense, and British captains liked to get in close and personal. At Trafalgar, some British ships had their guns literally touching those of the enemy. In such a duel, the advantage naturally went to those who expected this kind of encounter, wanted it, trained for it—and were confident of winning it.

  It was this ethos which made the Royal Navy what it was, this ethos which contributed to the construction of empire, the growth of trade, the globalization of industry. The doddering Monmouth proved mightier than she knew.

  * Another factor that came to be of great importance was the British strategy of blockading French ports. The result was that British crews—monotonously sailing the waters outside Brest or Toulon—had ample time to learn how to work together as a sailing and fighting unit. The French crews inside the ports came to be desperately short of match practice.

  HOW TO BE A SUPERPOWER

  Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the United States was merely a superpower, clashing nuclear arsenals with the Soviet Union. Since the demise of the USSR, however, the United States seems to have become something bigger: a hyperpower. It’s become a commonplace to say that the military dominance of the United States is greater than that exerted by any country ever; that the world has never seen such a formidable concentration of armed force.

  Well, maybe. Back in 1810, nobody talked about hyperpowers or their merely super cousins. All the same, the Sea Lords of the British Admiralty weren’t exactly fretting about the opposition. The maths looked like this:

  Ships of the line

  Britain 152 France 46

  Russia 35

  Spain 28

  Holland 13

  Sweden 13

  Portugal 11

  Denmark 2

  United States 0

  Rest of the world total 148

  Cruisers

  Britain 202 France 31

  Russia 14

  Spain 17

  Holland 5

  Sweden 8

  Portugal 14

  Denmark 0

  United States 9

  Rest of the world total 98

  Quite simply, Britain had a fleet that was larger than the naval forces of the whole of the rest of the world combined. Of course, there were nations other than those listed which possessed warships of some kind, but the above list includes all nations in possession of a serious modern navy. If Britain had had to fight the rest of the world at sea, Britain would have won.

  Those Sea Lords of 1810 couldn’t just look at the mathematics of power with some smugness, they could think with equal calm about the qualitative factors too. Whose men were the best trained? Whose officers were the best? Whose ships were most modern, most technologically cutting-edge? Whose ships were (thanks to their copper bottoms) able to spend most time at sea and the least time in port? Which navy had the best infrastructure at home, the strongest political support, the best range of facilities overseas? In every case, the answer was Britain. On sea at least, Britain was the superpower’s superpower, a hyperpower before its time.

  Yet the fact that Britain then and America now both attained a similar degree of strategic dominance (albeit that the British dominance was naval only) should not be taken to mean that they got there the same way. America’s current military strength is based on money. According to recent figures, the United States spends just shy of $500 billion on defence, the rest of the world together just over $700 billion. Of course, such thi
ngs as technological supremacy make a difference too, but that technical know-how also carries a price tag. The US hyperpower is mighty indeed, but the source of its strength is the American economy, political support—and all those billions of American tax dollars.

  In 1810, Britain was in a very different position. Britain’s shipyards were formidably productive, but they’d been outbuilt and outspent by France and its Bourbon ally Spain in the long century of warfare that led up to that moment. From 1689 to 1815, the track record looked like this:

  Total ships built Displacement tons

  Franco-Spanish Alliance 2,291,000

  Britain 1,907,000

  French advantage 384,000

  Displacement tonnage of 384,000 represents an awful lot of ships—the equivalent of about 110 HMS Victorys, or more than three times the entire British fleet at Trafalgar. If amassing the biggest navy was simply a question of building the most ships, then Trafalgar Day would now be celebrated in Paris, not London.

  This simple calculation reminds us that there are two routes to superpowerdom: the wallet and the gun. If you can’t out-spend the enemy, you can always outfight him. If you succeed in capturing the enemy’s ships, then you can patch them up, change the flag and add them to your own fleet—in effect, getting your enemy’s shipbuilders to work on your behalf. Both sides played this game, of course, but the British were much, much better at it. Over the same time period as before, the record of ships captured then incorporated into the victorious fleet is as follows:

  (Displacement tons) Ships lost by capture Ships gained by capture Balance

  Franco-Spanish Alliance 692,000 160,000 −532,000

  Britain 160,000 692,000 +532,000

  British advantage 1,064,000

  British superiority in warfare meant that the French and Spanish lost a net naval tonnage equivalent to 152 HMS Victorys, while Britain added the same number of vessels to its own fleet—a total advantage equal to 304 Victorys, or much more than ten times the British fleet at Trafalgar. And that’s simply to talk about ships captured. Yet for every three ships that were captured and added, there were roughly two more that had been burned, blown up, sunk or wrecked in combat. This was a fighting advantage that foreign shipbuilders couldn’t even begin to match. When Nelson sailed into action at Trafalgar, he didn’t think he was going to win, he knew he would—just as the French and Spanish commanders knew they’d lose.

  Does all this mean that Britain was the first ever superpower? Probably not. Its land army was and would remain puny. But the size of armies matters only if they meet—and the navy was there to make sure that never happened. In 1803, Lord St Vincent addressed the House of Lords, seeking to calm the renewed fears of a French invasion: ‘I do not say they cannot come, my Lords,’ he declaimed, ‘I only say they cannot come by sea.’ They were the confident words of a naval hyperpower.

  LACKING ELAN

  When, at a recent dinner party, I happened to mention that I was writing a book on British exceptionalism, one guest asked me to explain in detail what the book was to be about. When I told him, he leant forward and said emphatically, ‘Good! After all, we’ve won a lot of wars, haven’t we?’ It’s not only patriotic, Middle England Brits who think this way. Before the 2002 football World Cup in Japan and Korea, the Japanese police commenced intensive training to deal with the expected horde of hooligans from Europe, and most particularly those from England. I recall reading the comment of one Japanese police officer to the effect that the English had ‘never lost a war’.

  Such assessments are flattering, but hardly accurate. Yes, we’ve won plenty of wars, but then we’ve fought so many it would be surprising if we hadn’t.* Whereas British naval history, from at least 1588 to the outbreak of the Second World War, is largely a record of mounting success, our purely military record is a thing of fits and starts, remarkable successes and painful failures.

  That fitful record stretches a long way back. The one story that everyone knows about Anglo-Saxon England is Alfred burning the cakes, then beating the Danes. What’s usually omitted from this record of culinary failure and military success is what followed: the Danish resurgence, which would lead to England being ruled by the Danish King Cnut. Although the country that William conquered was certainly under English rule, it could easily have been otherwise.

  For the five hundred years following the Conquest, England’s military record is easily summarized. In 1174, the king of England’s possessions included a huge chunk of France stretching from the Channel to the Med, and from the Atlantic coast almost as far east as Paris. In 1558, Queen Mary died, having just lost Calais, England’s last toehold in France. Agincourt may be the only battle we remember from our school history lessons, but the simple truth is that England fought and failed to maintain its possessions. We lost. France won.

  The era of civil war and parliamentary rule brought an end to English failure. For the first time, English military leaders really applied themselves to understanding European techniques. That’s why so many military words of that era are foreign in origin: colonel, corporal, culverin, musket, bayonet. Under Oliver Cromwell—and for the first time ever—the English army came to be as good, in terms of discipline, arms and leadership, as any in Europe. The good times, however, didn’t last. With the return of royal rule and parliamentary stinginess, the army became rapidly inconsequential once again.

  Through the eighteenth century there were highs (Marlborough) and lows (the loss of America), though the army certainly succeeded in establishing itself as the efficient and bellicose enforcer of a rising imperial state. Napoleon’s eruption on to the European scene changed things again. His mobile tactics and search for the crushing victory revolutionized the nature of land warfare. Though the British forces under Wellington were (or became) excellent, they remained a minor factor in the scheme of things. When the Duke of Wellington crossed the Pyrenees into France in 1814, he had with him some 50,000 men. The French army entering Russia two years earlier had numbered almost 700,000.

  In the nineteenth century, the British army perfected the art of colonial warfare: adaptable, resourceful and increasingly able to make its technological superiority tell. (Before the nineteenth century, there was often little or no technological gap to be exploited.) When European war broke out again in 1914, the British Expeditionary Force was remarkable for its professionalism and nerve, but neither quality could ever win the day against the mass industrial-age armies of the Continental powers. Though the British army changed into a conscript army like every other, its leaders remained mired in nineteenth-century thinking, nineteenth-century attitudes.

  The Second World War was rather the same, fought by decent, reliable but unspectacular soldiers, who performed well or poorly depending on leadership. General Sir David Fraser summed up the army’s performance thus:

  [At the outset of war] it was starved of resources, incompetently administered and too small. For years British Governments persuaded themselves, and a public ready to hear, that Britain could stand aside from Continental war on land and that the dangers, if they existed, could be dealt with by others…

  The British Army did not always behave impeccably, whether in battle or out of it. It was sometimes ponderous and lacking in élan. It rarely showed the ‘handiness’ in mobile battle which was the hallmark of the Afrika Korps…But it came to know its business. And, without histrionics, it did it.

  Those comments could well serve as a verdict on British soldiering in general—and one that, in a book whose purpose is to search for the exceptional, suggests that we might do well to hurry on to more glorious things. If things military are under the microscope, then the Duke of Parma’s Spanish troops, or Napoleon’s revolutionary ones, or the Panzer-mounted ones of the Wehrmacht, would all deserve closer inspection than anything the British have ever assembled. Yet General Fraser’s pithy summary hints at perhaps the British army’s most curious—indeed exceptional—characteristic: it performed ‘without histrionics’.

/>   From the age of Henry VIII onwards, English, later British, strategy was founded on two axioms: (1) the army would never be capable of defeating a major European power in equal combat, and (2) a powerful navy was the first and surest defence against invasion. Those axioms remained true right through to the build-up to the First World War (and, as Fraser implies, their shadow continued to be felt thereafter too). The navy was the ‘Senior Service’; senior in date of formation, but senior in importance too. Nor was the army simply secondary. For much of its history, it was feared and despised—not by its enemies, but by those it guarded. For almost two centuries, England hung back from the European trend towards permanent standing armies. When a standing army was finally called into being under the pressure of civil war, it seemed to stand for everything that the English most loathed: high taxes, rapacious billeting, food shortages, disorderly behaviour.

  When Charles II was restored to the throne, parliament cut him the following deal: it would control and pay for a standing navy; Charles could have an army, but only if he paid for it himself. One particularly curious consequence of the arrangement was that parliamentary statute law didn’t even recognize the army’s existence. The army’s code of discipline therefore had no legal standing, which meant that the army had almost no power to punish such things as desertion or insubordination, except by such strikingly unfrightening punishments as stoppages of pay or dismissal. Furthermore, since soldiers’ pay came from the royal pocket, the men were paid badly, and consequently recruited from the worst sections of society—those parts best calculated to exhibit the true English love for boozing and brawling. Of course, those impressed for the navy were hardly likely to be teetotal Sunday school types either—but they were hidden away on ships; the soldiers were in yer face and down yer high street. Time and reform were to change these stereotypes, yet their anti-militarist after-image would remain, right up to the First World War.