The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

by Lawrence, James

  The fruits of this campaign fought by slave-soldiers and fever-ridden redcoats were listed by Dundas in 1801. In eight years, Britain had acquired Tobago, Martinique, Guadeloupe, St Lucia and the Saintes from the French, Curaçao, Demerara and Essequibo from Holland, and Trinidad from Spain, which had entered into an alliance with France in 1795. Further overseas gains were Malta, Minorca, and the Dutch colonies in the East Indies, Trincomalee on the coast of Ceylon (Sri-Lanka) and Cape Town. It was, by the standards of any previous war, an impressive haul and deeply satisfying to the commercial community who welcomed new markets.

  These were desperately needed in 1801. On the Continent the war had gone the French way, despite early prophecies that the makeshift Revolutionary armies would quickly fall apart when they encountered regular troops. The reverse had happened, with Austrian, Prussian and Russian armies coming off worse in nearly every engagement. What was more, the French had discovered how to compensate for their financial weakness by making war pay for itself; as they fanned out into the Low Countries, the Rhineland, Switzerland and northern Italy, French armies lived off the land, and topped up their war-chests with forced contributions from the people they had liberated. At the same time French soldiers, learning as they fought, developed a tough professionalism and the Revolutionary principle of making talent the sole criterion for promotion encouraged the emergence of a cadre of highly able and intelligent commanders.

  Britain’s contribution to the land war in Europe had been negligible. Following earlier precedents, the younger Pitt had despatched expeditionary forces to the Low Countries but, undermanned and mismanaged, they were quickly sent packing. Another old expedient had to be reluctantly revived in 1794–5, when Pitt was forced to offer subsidies and loans to Austria and Prussia for whom the financial strain of the war had been too great. British credit kept Austrian, Prussian and, in 1799, Russian armies in the fight, but it did not improve their performance on the battlefield. France’s armies remained unbeatable, and by 1801 it had absorbed the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium) and the Rhineland and established satellite republics in Holland, Switzerland and northern Italy.

  The fortunes of the land war in western Europe affected the naval balance of power in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. In 1793 this had strongly favoured the Royal Navy, which mustered 115 line-of-battle ships against France’s 76. The conquest of the Netherlands in 1795 added 59 battleships to the French total, and the Spanish alliance a further 76. The risk of an overwhelming Franco-Dutch-Spanish concentration in home waters was so great that, early in 1797, the Mediterranean fleet withdrew to deploy off Spain’s Atlantic coastline. The alarm proved premature; in February 1797 Admiral Sir John Jervis led his heavily outnumbered fleet in an attack on the Spanish off Cape St Vincent and took four battleships, and in October, Admiral Lord Duncan severely mauled the Dutch at Camperdown.

  The pressure was off for the time being, although the nerves of the Admiralty and fleet commanders had been severely jolted by the waves of disaffection that had run through the Channel and Mediterranean fleets during the early summer. There were further mutinies, mostly by pressed Irish sailors infected with the nationalist virus, and a spate of unrest on foreign stations which lasted well into 1798. The hidden hand of Jacobin agitators was feared and some were uncovered, but for the greater part the sailors’ grievances were limited to their working conditions, wages and treatment, matters on which the government was willing to offer concessions.

  The victories of 1797 confirmed British paramountcy in the Channel and Atlantic, but the French held the initiative in the Mediterranean. By the beginning of 1798, the Toulon fleet had been refurbished and transports were assembling in the harbour to take on board a 17,000-strong army, commanded by Napoleon. Its purpose was to strike a knock-out blow against Britain, but a question mark hung over its destination. There were two alternatives; an invasion of Ireland, where the French landfall would be a signal for a mass uprising by the Gaelic, Catholic Irish, or Egypt. Egypt was chosen on strategic grounds since its occupation would jeopardise Britain’s considerable commercial interests in the Middle East, and place a French army within striking distance of India.

  The sheer boldness of Napoleon’s plan still astonishes. Yet it was taken seriously by Dundas, whose specialist advisers agreed that an attack on India, either overland across Syria and Iraq or through the Red Sea, was perfectly feasible, and that Napoleon might expect assistance from the Shah of Persia (Iran) and the Amir of Afghanistan. Moreover, it was imagined that even a small force of European troops could easily tilt the Indian balance of power against Britain. All this was a nasty shock for the cabinet, and Dundas, who was certain that the loss of India would prove ‘fatal’ to Britain, ordered reinforcements to be rushed there.

  They were not needed. Napoleon’s master-stroke was frustrated when his fleet and transports were destroyed by Admiral Sir Horatio, later Lord, Nelson at Abukir Bay in August. The French army, abandoned by its General who hurried back to Paris to further his political career, was left isolated in Egypt. It was finally evicted by a British expeditionary force sent for the purpose in 1801. In India the Marquess Wellesley moved quickly to eliminate France’s potential ally, Tipu Sultan, and prepared to do likewise to the Mahrathas who employed French mercenaries.

  The episode had been nerve-wracking for British ministers, who had been given an object lesson in the vulnerability of India and its communications. Even if Napoleon had simply stayed put in Egypt, he would have severed the so-called ‘overland route’ to India. This stretched from Port Said across the Suez isthmus to Alexandria and provided the fastest means of communication between Britain and India. It was clear from the events of 1798 that the future security of India required British control of the Mediterranean and political domination of the Ottoman empire, whose territories now became a vast glacis defending India’s western frontiers. Furthermore, the possibility that the rulers of Persia and Afghanistan might have connived with Napoleon made it imperative that both countries were drawn into Britain’s orbit. Napoleon’s Egyptian adventure had laid the foundations of British policy in the Mediterranean and Middle East for the next hundred and fifty years. It had also opened up a new region for Franco-British imperial rivalry which gathered pace after 1815.

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  For the moment, France’s war aims were confined to Europe. Here there had been a brief peace, signed at Amiens in the spring of 1802, which was no more than a breathing space during which Britain and France bickered and recovered their strength. When the war reopened just over a year later, Napoleon set his mind on the conquest of Britain, which he recognised as his most formidable and implacable enemy. His invasion plans demanded mastery of the Channel by the Franco-Spanish fleet based at Toulon. This broke through the blockade in May 1805, made a feint towards the West Indies, but was intercepted by Nelson off Cape Trafalgar in October and destroyed. Eighteen battleships were taken or sunk and with them went all hopes of France ever again challenging Britain at sea. Stringent measures were taken to hinder the rebuilding of the French navy, including a preemptive attack on Copenhagen and the seizure of the Danish fleet in 1807. Fears of an invasion receded, France’s overseas trade was choked and Britain was free to continue engorging itself on her enemies’ colonies, including some which had been returned at Amiens.

  On land, Napoleon was triumphant. His Grande Armée, originally earmarked for the invasion of Britain, turned against her allies, Austria, Prussia and Russia. Between 1805 and 1807 he chalked up an amazing sequence of victories: Ulm, Austerlitz, Jena-Auerstädt, Eylau and Friedland. As a result, Austria, Prussia and Russia were impelled, literally at gunpoint, to accept a new European order devised by Napoleon. The Continent was now dominated by an enlarged France and its satellites, the Kingdoms of Italy and Westphalia, the Confederation of the Rhine and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Whether or not directly under Napoleon’s heel, all the states of Europe were forced to adopt his 1806 Berlin Decrees which forbade all commerce with Britain.


  Britain answered with an embargo of its own, enforced by the Royal Navy, which brought Europe’s overseas trade to a virtual standstill. Europeans were denied such products as tobacco and sugar, which had been re-exported by Britain, and British manufactured goods such as cotton. France could not make up the shortfall since her industry lacked the capacity to satisfy Europe’s markets, and her import trade had been all but extinguished by the blockade. While Europe’s trade stagnated, Britain’s actually expanded as merchants penetrated new markets in the United States (until the war of 1812), Asia, the Middle East and, despite resistance, Spanish South America. Fresh outlets for British goods obviously offset the loss of older markets, but they did not entirely replace them. By the winter of 1811–12 a recession seemed likely as exports were in the doldrums and manufacturing output was falling.

  The search for new commercial advantage was carried on with great vigour. After the reoccupation of Cape Town in 1806, the local commander, Admiral Sir Home Popham, off his own bat delivered a coup de main against Buenos Aires in May of that year. News of his exploit aroused enormous excitement in London, where senior army and naval officers combined with business interests to promote a profitable war of conquest against the whole of Spanish America. Dreams of a new American empire with vast markets proved illusory; nerveless command and mismanagement led to an ignominious evacuation of the River Plate by midsummer 1807.

  By this time events in Europe were taking a new turn. Napoleon’s attempts to browbeat Portugal and set his featherbrained brother, Joseph, on the throne of Spain dragged him into an unfamiliar type of war. The Spanish insurrection of May 1808 was a spontaneous, popular uprising, which took the French by surprise, and forced their generals to fight a guerrilla war in a countryside where food and fodder was scarce. The Portuguese and Spanish appealed to Britain, and the government immediately pledged cash, arms and an army. Pitt had been dead for two years, but his ideas still formed the framework of British policy, which was to offer unqualified help to anyone who promised to fight France.

  The resulting Anglo-Spanish-Portuguese alliance was one of convenience rather than conviction. Portugal was transformed into a British dependency for the next six years, and the Spanish, suspecting that Britain coveted their American possessions and commerce, steadfastly resisted demands to open their markets to British merchants. Old hatreds died hard; in 1814 British merchants in Buenos Aires complained that local officials were ‘arbitrary, insulting and vexatious’, and that they suffered the ‘bigotted Zeal and vindictive rage of the soldiery’, and in the same year a British sloop was fired on by the guns of the fort at Cartagena.8 Nevertheless the alliance held, thanks to the tact and firmness of the British commander-in-chief, Arthur Wellesley. He was a consummate strategist who saw from the first that he was about to conduct a war of attrition in which the winning army would be that which was well-fed and supplied. The navy escorted convoys of merchantmen to Lisbon, where cargoes of grain and fodder were unloaded for distribution up country. There were many nail-biting moments, but on the whole Wellesley’s troops did not starve. The French, living off the land, did.

  Moreover, Wellesley repeatedly beat French armies. His string of victories between 1808 and 1812 made the Iberian peninsula the graveyard of French marshals’ reputations, and dispelled for ever the myth of French invincibility. Disengagement from an unwinnable war was unthinkable for Napoleon, since it would be a confession of weakness which was bound to encourage resistance elsewhere. He was politically bankrupt, with nothing to offer Europe but economic stagnation, heavy taxes and conscription, the last two necessary to preserve the war machine with which he menaced anyone who opposed his will. His confidence, one could almost say hubris, remained high, and at the beginning of 1812 he was preparing to solve his problems in the only way he knew how, by war. He intended to overawe Russia, which was showing disconcerting signs of independence, and then, in person, take charge of affairs in Spain.

  The invasion of Russia, designed as an exercise in intimidation, went awry. French muddle, miscalculation and over-confidence combined with Russian doggedness to cause first the disintegration, and then the destruction of the Grande Armée during the autumn and winter of 1812–13. Prussia broke ranks and joined Russia, and so too did Austria after a little hesitation. Britain was swift to rebuild a new coalition delivering its members just over £26 million in subsidies and loan guarantees as well as cannon and muskets from her foundries and workshops.

  Napoleon’s European imperium fell apart quickly. Founded on victories, it could not survive the defeats inflicted on its master’s armies in the autumn and winter of 1813–14. Joseph Bonaparte was finally turned out of Spain, and in January 1814 Wellesley, now Duke of Wellington, led an Anglo-Portuguese army into southern France. Squeezed between Wellington and the Austrians, Prussians and Russians who were striking deep into eastern France, Napoleon abdicated in April. A year later he returned from Elba, convinced that he could again mesmerise his countrymen with fresh dreams of martial glory. The end came at Waterloo where he suffered a decisive defeat at the hands of Wellington and Blücher’s Prussians. At the end of June, Napoleon surrendered to the British, and was sent in exile to their remotest colony, St Helena where, unchastened, he brooded on his mistakes.

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  Winning the war against France had been a Herculean effort. The conventional wisdom, then and later, attributed final victory to seapower because, above all, it ensured that Britain stayed in the ring. The ships of the Royal Navy had prevented invasion; they had confined French power to Europe and allowed Britain to occupy nearly all the overseas possessions of her adversaries; they had guarded the convoys which sustained Wellington’s army in the peninsula; and they had guaranteed the survival of Britain’s global commerce, which generated the wealth needed to pay for her war effort, and underwrite those of the three big European powers with armies large enough to engage Napoleon on equal terms.

  There were many reasons for the navy’s success. The determination, self- confidence and professionalism of its officers and crews owed much to traditions established in the previous hundred years. Nelson was outstanding as a leader and tactician, but Duncan, Jervis and Collingwood also deserve high praise. All understood their country’s predicament and how much depended on them, which was why, whenever the chance came for battle, they grabbed at it, regardless of the odds. In the decisive battles of Cape St Vincent, Camperdown, Abukir Bay and Trafalgar the British fleets were outnumbered but, trusting to superior seamanship and gunnery, their admirals took the offensive. An aggressive, gambling spirit paid off. As Nelson famously observed, an officer who laid his ship alongside the enemy could never be in the wrong.

  Much depended on the individual naval officer’s instinctively correct response to an emergency, something which Nelson cultivated among his subordinates to the point where they knew without being told what he expected of them. This quality filtered downwards. During an engagement with the French frigate Topaze off Guadeloupe in January 1809, Captain William Maude of the Jason saw no need to inform the commander of his consort, the Cleopatra, of his intentions. ‘I considered it unnecessary to make any signals to him, and he most fully anticipated my wishes by bringing his ship to anchor on the frigate’s starboard bow and opening a heavy fire,’ Maude wrote afterwards.9 The action lasted forty minutes and was decided by superior broadsides aimed against the French ship’s hull.

  Adroitness and accuracy in manning of guns and agility in reefing or unfurling sails, so vital for quick manoeuvres, required careful and intense training of crews, nearly all of whom were pressed or conscripted landsmen. Many, perhaps the majority of officers ruled their ships as the squire did his village, with a strong but fatherly hand. This pattern of leadership, which reflected the values of the ruling class and the hierarchy of contemporary civilian life, also extended to the army where it was encouraged by Wellington who insisted that a gentleman’s sense of personal honour included an active concern for the welfar
e of those beneath him. In 1783, a naval officer reprimanded for spending money to provide treatment for his sick, responded with a classic statement of service paternalism:

  As a British officer I always consider myself accountable to my King and Country for the lives of the Seamen under my command and more particularly in the present instance, as they are returning to their Native Country after having endured great hardships and fatigues in His Majesty’s Service, and had so gallantly distinguished themselves in several actions in India.10

  Not all officers shared such sentiments, especially during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. The desperate need to transform civilians into skilled seamen as quickly as possible, and fears that some might be infected with Jacobin opinions, led many officers to rely on intimidation as the sole means of preserving discipline. According to the crew of HMS Magnificent, Lieutenant Marshall was one of this kind.

  His tyranny is not bearable, we are able and willing to loose the last drop of Blood in Defence of our Gracious King and country, but to fight under him will hurt us very much, for the least fault he makes the Boatswain’s mates thrash us most unmerciful … He threatens to make us all jump over board. Indeed part of his threats is already taking place as two unfortunate fellows in attempting to swim on shore is drowned.11