The Years of Endurance

by Arthur Bryant

  Already there were signs that this was no empty hope. Prussia still refused to rouse herself from selfish sloth; Russia under her half-mad Emperor Paul remained a remote and inscrutable factor. But Austria, jockeyed at the council table at Rastadt from her ancient leadership of Germany and insulted by upstart Jacobins, was growing restive. In March Chancellor Thugut instructed his ambassador Starhemberg to ask if Britain would aid his country against " a fierce nation irrevocably determined on the total subversion of Europe." And he suggested the return of a British fleet to the Mediterranean.

  At the beginning of April Pitt therefore raised the question in Cabinet. Lord Spencer and the naval authorities were wholly unfavourable. With thirty Spanish battleships at Cadiz and thirty French—in whatever state of readiness—at Brest, with the seven Dutch survivors from Camperdown still at the Helder, Britain would need at least seventy capital ships to justify the risk of detaching even the smallest force to the south. At the moment, though several new ships were nearing completion, she could only dispose of fifty-eight, twenty-four off Cadiz and the remaining thirty-four in home and Irish waters. The dispatch of a battle squadron to the Mediterranean, the Junior Sea Lord reported, might be attended by the most dreadful consequences.1

  These professional counsels failed to dispirit Pitt. His instinct, which was in accord with that of his country, told him that the moment had come to change to the offensive and that the only real security lay in so doing. Something of his father's spirit and genius for war seemed to have entered into him that spring. He saw clearly that St. Vincent's position off Cadiz would soon be untenable unless the European situation was radically changed in England's favour. Ever since the autumn the feeble Portuguese Court, terrified by the threatening preparations of Spain, had been plotting to free itself from its British treaty commitments and close the Tagus to St. Vincent's provision ships. The intimidating presence of the old Admiral at Lisbon and the masterly handling by General Stuart of a small British force from Elba, which had landed for the defence of Portugal, had so far staved off surrender. But it was ultimately inevitable, for though reports from Cadiz showed that the Spaniards, who had nothing to gain and everything to lose by further Gallic triumphs, were heartily sick of the war, the Directory's contemptuous hold over the dictator Godoy was far too strong to be shaken so long as the French were masters of the Continent.2

  1 Observations of Rear-Admiral William Young, wrongly dated February, 1797, in Spencer Papers, II, 231. For Spencer's opinion see ibid., 322.

  2 Captain Collingwood wrote on January 26th, 1798, that Spain was no longer an independent nation. Five months later he added : " The Spaniards are well disposed to peace and the interest of their country requires it; but God knows whether their French friends will allow that. . . . Nothing is more certain than that the continuance of the war is disastrous to Spain."—Collingwood, 62, 67-8. British and Spanish naval officers corresponded on the friendliest terms, exchanged presents of wine and food and even on occasion entertained one another, while Spanish peasants sold supplies to British sailors. It is interesting to compare this enforced Franco-Spanish alliance with the present relations between Germany and Italy.

  Pitt, as always when his mind was resolved, carried the Cabinet with him. The increased risk of invasion was not too high a price to pay to bring Austria and her satellite Naples back into the war, and he felt sufficient confidence in the newly-revived spirit of Britain to take it. He was strongly supported by Dundas, whose mind, true to the Chatham tradition in which it had been cradled, always ran on the offensive.1 For all his ignorant and wasteful blunders, the sturdy Scot never lost confidence. " If we can be alive in our offensive movements at home and can strike some great stroke in the Mediterranean," he wrote to the First Lord, " the game must be up with the French government." 2 Grenville and the Foreign Office, with their eyes on the wider interests of Europe, also backed the Prime Minister. So did the chivalrous Windham.3

  Accordingly on May 2nd, 1798, Cabinet instructions were sent to St. Vincent to detach part of his fleet for a sweep in the Mediterranean. They were accompanied by a private letter from Spencer. " When you are apprised,' he wrote, " that the appearance of a British squadron in the Mediterranean is a condition on which the fate of Europe may at this moment be said to depend, you will not be surprised that we are disposed to strain every nerve and incur considerable hazard in effecting it." And the First Lord went on to suggest that in the event of St. Vincent not commanding it in person, it should be entrusted to the junior flag ofEcer on the station, Sir Horatio Nelson.

  By a strange coincidence, on the day that this letter was written Nelson left St. Vincent's fleet for the Mediterranean. Only a month before he had sailed from England after a long and painful convalescence. " The wind is fair," he had written to his father from Portsmouth, " in two hours I shall be on board and with the lark I shall be off to-morrow morning." He reached the blockading fleet on April 30th, a little depressed at the prospect of an uneventful summer off Cadiz. Within two days he had been ordered

  1 See Spencer Papers, II, 317.

  2 See Spencer Papers, II, 353.

  3 " An English fleet," he had written at an earlier juncture, should be . . . in the Mediterranean to give that succour and protection which I conceive all the countries upon those shores are looking for at our hands and which it would be a proud distinction in us to grant. I long to think that Rome, our common mother, should owe her safety ... to the protecting justice of Great Britain."—Windham Papers, I, 119-20.

  by St. Vincent to proceed with three battleships and five small craft to Toulon to report on the preparations and destination of a powerful French fleet. His mission was not to fight but to obtain information.

  For, despite French attempts at secrecy and Bonaparte's studied delay at Paris, news of immense concentrations in Provencal and Italian ports had reached St. Vincent. At Toulon and Marseilles, at Genoa, Civita Vecchia and in Corsica hundreds of transports were assembling, troops embarking and battleships, frigates and corvettes moving into position for some great venture. As early as April 24th, only twelve days after the Directors in Paris had signed the formal order for the Egyptian expedition, The Times printed circumstantial details of the force. Three days later the same paper reported its destination to be either Ireland or Portugal. Colling-wood wrote on May 1st that the French had announced the objective to be Naples and Sicily—a view strongly held by the terrified Court of Naples—but that the Americans who had brought the intelligence to Cadiz were convinced that it was England.

  The possibility of Egypt does not appear to have been seriously canvassed in London. This was the more curious because during April Dundas received warning from a spy of a scheme for sending 400 French officers via Egypt and Suez to India to offer their services to Tippoo Sahib and the Mahratta chiefs and stir up war in Hindustan.1 And India was always the apple of Dundas's eye. Only a few days earlier in a letter to Spencer he had stated his belief that any European Power gaining control of Egypt would acquire the master key of the world's commerce.

  But for the moment the obvious danger to the Empire was not to its circumference but its heart. It never seems to have seriously occurred to the Cabinet that France's impending blow could fall elsewhere. If the new armada in the south was not, like that at Brest, Cadiz and the Texel, intended for the British Isles, it must be bound for Naples and Sicily to forestall any new Coalition and so safeguard the French rear during the hazards of an invasion. By far its most likely destination was Ireland. This was the firm conviction both of the Irish Government and of Pitt. The dispatch of part of St. Vincent's fleet to the Mediterranean seemed an

  1 News of the landing of French engineers at Alexandria on April 20th, 1798, did not reach the British Government till July 5th.

  anticipation of an encounter which must otherwise be fought off the Irish coast.

  For here in the island which she had conquered, misgoverned and never understood, proud England was faced with disaster and def
eat. Four million Irish were united in a sudden resolve to fling off the yoke of ten million English, Scots and Welsh, themselves engaged in a life-and-death struggle with more than forty million Frenchmen, Spaniards and Dutchmen. To crush the republicans of United Ireland, Dublin Castle had played its time-honoured trump card of Protestant ascendancy. But instead of crushing republicanism the Protestant ascendancy was itself threatened by a fanatic Catholic insurgence. Holy Ireland had been transformed by the bureaucracy into a Jacobin province.

  Dublin Castle had been repeatedly warned of its folly. It had paid no heed. In November, 1797, that fine soldier, Lord Moira— himself an Irish landlord—had declared in the English House of Lords that he had witnessed in Ireland " the most absurd as well as the most disgusting tyranny that any nation ever groaned under." Three months later another soldier made an appeal for a wiser policy. At the end of 1797 Sir Ralph Abercromby, back from the West Indies, was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Army in Ireland. He found its demoralisation a greater menace to English rule than any invader. At the end of February, 1798, appalled by the outrages that followed the Lord Lieutenant's illegal licence to the military to aid the civil power without magisterial authority— in Irish to act as agents of partisan warfare—the old soldier took the grave step of issuing a general order in which he described his army as being in a state of licentiousness that made it " formidable to every one but the enemy."

  The only effect of this bombshell was a clamour by the Irish bureaucracy for Abercromby's recall: a demand to which Pitt and Portland gave way.1 Nothing could shake the obstinacy of Dublin Castle: at every moderating suggestion it pointed to the very real horror of Irish atrocities as a reason for increasing its own oppressions. It was even accused by the Opposition of deliberately

  1 The King, whose narrowness in religious matters did not extend to questions of Army discipline, refused to countenance his Ministers* betrayal of this brave old soldier and showed him marked attention at the next Levee.

  inciting a rebellion in order to discredit its opponents. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. Yet nothing could have seemed more like it. For in its intemperate fear of Papist risings, massacres and French landings, it invited all three.

  By the spring of 1798 the British garrisons in Ireland outside the Protestant pale were barely holding down the native population. Everywhere little islands of red were receding before a rising tide of sullen green. " The lower ranks," Abercromby wrote in January, " heartily hate the gentlemen because they oppress them and the gentlemen hate the peasants because they know they deserve to be hated." 1 Every one was waiting for the French. A discovery at the end of February revealed the existence of an elaborate channel of communication between Ireland and the Continent. A round of arrests in London was followed on May 19th by the seizure of Lord Edward Fitzgerald in a Dublin slum. Mortally wounded in the encounter the brilliant young Irish aristocrat died a fortnight later.

  His arrest threw the Irish leaders into confusion, for he was the pivot on which rebellion turned. It had been planned for the night of May 23rd. But that day the authorities, acting on information, seized thousands of arms. Only a discouraged handful of rebels, assembling in the suburbs of the capital, obeyed the orders of the Irish Rebel Directory. Farther afield in Kildare and Wicklow bands of insurgents attempted to seize strong points on the roads into Dublin but were everywhere repelled.

  But on the 26th the revolt broke out in a more serious form and where it was least expected. Led by Father Murphy, a Catholic priest, more than 30,000 armed peasants rose in the thriving countryside of Wexford. Believing their leader to be under the special protection of Heaven, they seized the hill of Oulart, annihilated a force of Militia and, advancing on Ferns, burnt the episcopal palace.

  Whitsunday, May 27th, was a day of terror. In England it was marked by intense heat and by a strange encounter in a lonely dell of gorse and silver birches on Putney Common. For two days before, during a debate on manning the Navy, Pitt, maddened by the obstructive tactics of the Opposition, had accused Tierney of deliberately sabotaging the country's defence and had been ruled out of order by the Speaker. Refusing to withdraw his words, he had been challenged by the stout irascible Irishman and, before either

  1 William Pitt and the Great War, 352.

  the King or public opinion could intervene to prevent the scandal, the two statesmen had met and fired off pistols at one another— fortunately without effect. The public alarm was immense.1 That night London learnt of the rising in Wexford.

  Next day the rebels captured Enniscorthy, celebrating their triumph by a night of massacre and arson. Scarcely a Protestant escaped. On the 30th Camden, beside himself with terror, believed the situation to be beyond repair. To crown his fears he had heard three days earlier from Portland: that nine battleships had been sent from the Irish station to reinforce St. Vincent's fleet off Cadiz. He wrote to Pitt on the 29th telling him that Ireland was irretrievably lost without reinforcements from England: it was useless to send cavalry as they were powerless against the pikes of the fanatic peasantry. Pitt replied on June 2nd with the calm habitual to him in time of crisis: the troops, including Guards, had already been dispatched but should be returned as soon as possible so as not to dislocate the general conduct of the war. About the same time he received intelligence that the French fleet had left Toulon, bound, as he believed, for Ireland.

  But it was not for Ireland, where on Vinegar Hill 30,000 victorious rebels awaited their long-promised coming, that the French had sailed. Instead of seizing the greatest chance he was ever to know for striking England to the heart, Bonaparte was receding into the Orient for his own personal glory. A moral flaw in her rule of a subject people had placed England at her foe's mercy. A still greater flaw in her foe caused the chance to be neglected. Had the logic of Jacobin philosophy resulted in the rule of a selfless patriot like Carnot, such ablunder could never have been made. But it had led inevitably—as Burke had always foretold—to the dictatorship of ascoundrel like Barras and a military adventurer like Bonaparte. For their failings France had to pay dear.

  The opportunity which the Corsican missed now passed to another. In his public actions Nelson was swayed by only one thought—love of country. " In my mind's eye," he told Hardy, " I ever saw a radiant orb suspended which beckoned me onwards to renown." But by renown he meant not glory for its own sake but for the good of his country. For all the failings of an ardent nature, 1 Hannah More, II, 14-15.

  he was essentially a moral man. Born in a Norfolk parsonage, he was a child of the Church of England. From the influence of its homely piety, he had passed at the age of twelve to the rough life of the Navy. Its leading principle—that of unquestioning duty— had been transformed in the crucible of his imagination into a source of passionate inspiration.

  Without influence he had risen by sheer merit to the rank of post-captain before he was twenty-one. He impressed every one with whom he came into contact professionally with the sense that he was no common being. But his greatest success was with those under his command. He was a man who led by love and example. There was nothing he would not do for those who served under him. There was nothing they would not dare for Nelson.

  The exigencies of peace after the American war and what seemed to his superiors in that mediocre time the inconvenient excess of his zeal for the Service had deprived him in 1787 of employment. For five years he led the life of a poor half-pay officer, eating out his heart ashore, farming his father's glebe and fretting under the tedium of a respectable but ill-assorted marriage. They were years in which his career seemed finished and in which he and his friend Collingwood in like retirement told each other that they despaired of chance ever drawing them back to the seashore.

  The outbreak of war found Nelson bombarding the Admiralty with requests for a ship, though it were only a cockle boat. They gave him a sixty-four, and since then—save for a winter's sick leave after the loss of his arm—he had been on continuous service in the Med
iterranean, cheerfully fulfilling every mission entrusted to him, and by his anxiety to excel in the execution of duty winning a reputation for almost foolhardy gallantry. For four years he had toiled and waited for his hour until the discernment of Jervis and the chance of battle at St. Vincent brought him on to a wider stage. Then in his first independent command as a flag officer he had tasted defeat—albeit glorious defeat—at Tenerife. He had returned to England physically shattered, with the hope of ever serving again almost vanished.

  Now, nearing his fortieth year, he was again in command, with his reputation a little uncertain as of a man too reckless for his age. His countrymen, slow to recognise intellect, know his courage and ardour but had little conception of the quality of his mind. They had yet to realise its infinite capacity for taking pains, its knife-like penetration, its brilliant clarity. Its very lucidity, reducing every scheme and command to elemental terms such as a child could understand, tended to deceive them. They thought of him as a simple sailorman. They never conceived of him, till his miraculous deeds enlightened them, as the supreme embodiment of the genius of their country.

  After many years of apprenticeship, he was now to be pitted against the most dazzling genius of his age—himself the embodiment of that great and terrifying explosion of human energy which patient England was struggling to hold in bounds. Nelson's, success or failure was to depend on his ability to guess and anticipate the thought of his adversary. To that test he brought qualities) of an almost unique order: immense professional knowledge and experience, the fruits of life-long application and discipline, selfless devotion to duty, inspired courage, a great heart and the imagination which can mobilise the evidence of the present and past to predict the future. His was that strange combination of brooding patience, study and intense concentration with a mercurial temperament that rose like lightning out of storm and in the hour chosen of destiny lighted the path to victory. Above all his power was based, like his country's, on adherence to moral law: once he was convinced that a course was right, nothing could shake his constancy to it and the burning tenacity of his purpose. The strength of his will was equal to Napoleon's. And because it derived more consistently from enduring principles it prevailed. Nelson's career of fame rose from victory to ever greater victory. Napoleon's rose and then fell.