by Tom Anderson
L’Administrateur added reluctantly that in order to ensure success, the entire available French army should be committed to the task. That meant that any operation against Royal France – and by extension her protector Britain – would have to wait. Boulanger, who had viewed Lisieux’s dismissal of the reverses on other fronts with worry, was at least relieved that L’Administrateur remained sufficiently in touch with reality to recognise this. Some biographers have argued that this sense of relief was sufficient to ensure Boulanger did not significantly object to the plan, and without him, it went ahead easily. Boulanger was one of the few men who still dared criticise Lisieux, and he was respected. It was generally thought among the military that if a plan was unworkable or suicidal, Boulanger would be able to talk Lisieux out of it. As it was, the strategy – which Lisieux dubbed Le Grand Crabe, evoking the vast pincer movement at its heart – went ahead.
Lisieux set a timescale of approximately eighteen months and ordered a full war footing to commence. Troops were conscripted in a more systematic manner. New battalions were raised in the puppet republics and funnelled into France to form auxiliaries. Hoche in particular had brought a hard core of veteran Italian loyalists with him, and was placed in control of the army effort by Lisieux, as Boulanger was given responsibility for holding Piedmont against the Hapsburgs and trying to maintain control over Spain. Lisieux still distrusted Hoche, but recognised that his charisma and skill would be necessary for the task ahead.
The situation was complicated by the fact that the Dutch Stadtholder William V died in 1806 and was replaced by his son William VI, who tended towards a more placatory approach to France – not least because he was concerned about radical political factions in his own country and needed the help of Flemish and German mercenaries to keep them down. It was William VI who exiled the Dutch Linnaean thinker Sijbren Vorderman, who took up residence in Denmark, which was less paranoid about French ideas. William VI’s accession caused hesitation in the Boulangerie as Lisieux pondered if it might be possible to split the Netherlands away from Flanders after all. However, it soon became clear that William VI was largely beholden to the same States-General politicians who had backed his father, and so overall Dutch policy would not change. The preparation for Le Grand Crabe resumed.
The year wore on, Iberia continuing to deteriorate but Boulanger holding his own in Piedmont, and the overthrow of the Bavarian Germanic Republic and the Budweis Clique were more blows for those in France who still wished to export the Revolution. Lisieux cared not. By January 1807, Le Grand Crabe was ready.
It is true that no battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.[51] However, Le Grand Crabe would be one of those unhappy few not to survive contact with its own architects…
Chapter #65: A Series of Unfortunate Events
“…in conclusion, this thesis argues that the Wars of Supremacy, in particular the third, were indeed the first global conflicts. If any had eyes to see them, the lessons were written there in letters of blood as surely as if they had been scratched into slates in an Eton classroom. In a global war, a battle, an incident, a confrontation can drastically alter the strategic situation elsewhere. Particularly significant for the European statesman is the knowledge that a colonial war can have repercussions for the home country.
It is a lesson that was taken to heart on the Continent, where men knew well that a crisis in the Americas or the East Indies could lead to armies surging over the border at home. It was, however, ignored in Britain. The seas guarded the island and the Royal Navy’s proud wooden wall made that defence impregnable, ministers boasted. It gave our land far more freedom in dealing with distant colonial affairs than our rivals in Europe, and perhaps that is partly responsible for our greater successes throughout the eighteenth century.
And yet the lesson was still there to be learned. The War of the British Succession illustrated how an American disagreement could topple a king from his throne and lead to civil war breaking out across the Empire. That was the early 1750s. One might assume that the ministers of sixty years later had taken to heart their grandfathers’ experiences. But any man with a modicum of experience of the vagaries of human nature will know what his heart tells him: they were not. This mistake must not be repeated yet again…”
- George Spencer-Churchill, Supremacy: A Treatise on Global Warfare (1931)
*
From: “Fatal Hesitation: The Foxite Ministry” by Sir Arthur Rumbelow (1912)—
The situation of the armed forces under Charles James Fox’s ministries has been argued in a circle for now more than a century. The matter is not helped by the fact that so many records were lost in the subsequent waves of unpleasantness and historians have found it hard to reconstruct the details of the period, particularly when so many of them have an axe to grind, being apologists for either the Royal Navy or for Fox himself.
Nevertheless, the third part of this volume shall attempt to set forth the most neutral possible reconstruction of the history of the British armed forces in the critical years between 1800 and 1807. It shall personally be considered a success if it manages to offend all sides equally.
Fox is sometimes painted as an absurdly naïve figure, ahead of his time in many ways perhaps yet somehow physically incapable of recognising Lisieux’s French Latin Republic, or indeed any ‘progressive’ state, such as the UPSA, as an enemy. While there is certainly a grain of truth in this popular image, immortalised in a dozen Gillray caricatures, common sense would suggest that such a man could not possibly have remained Prime Minister for very long, particularly when his own agenda was so controversial. Fox had help, of course, but he was neither an imbecile nor, as an alternative interpretation popular among historians in the ’70s suggested, a puppet of Richard Burke. His judgement was often coloured and flawed by his all-or-nothing approach to politics, but his ultimate fate is more the result of a string of poor fortune than of grave miscalculation.
With hindsight, Burke himself is often painted as a visionary locked away into being a junior coalition partner by his youth and the political situation, and some have argued in all seriousness that if Burke had succeeded Fox as Prime Minister as late as the general election of 1806, Britain would have been in a surer position when the storm came. This is simply nonsense. While Burke and Fox often differed strongly in opinion, Burke was a part of the problem, as is attested to by many of the surviving records. While Fox’s notion of radical liberty was centred around change – often, many opposition MPs argued, change for the sake of change – Burke’s, like his father’s, looked back to the principles of the Constitution of 1689 and the First Glorious Revolution. Central to those principles, drawn up while the military dictatorship of Cromwell was in living memory, was the fact that a standing army was more trouble than it was worth. So the Fox Ministry saw cutbacks to the British Army, with several regiments losing their second battalion. Although this led to increased unemployment, it remained a broadly popular move among the people, as it reduced taxes slightly and assuaged grumbles directed at misbehaving soldiers at a time when Britain was at peace.
However, both Burke and Fox concurred that the armed forces needed modernisation. This was accepted even by many opposition reactionaries. Not a few MPs who were sitting by 1804 or so had served in the army of the ill-fated Prince Frederick George during the Seigneur Offensive, and had experienced the Republican French steam war machines firsthand. It was clear that such technologies had to be matched by the British Army if they were to face the French again in the future – or, as Fox put it, if other armies were to duplicate them. Despite having quite a conservative military culture, Great Britain had led Europe in innovation throughout the first half of the eighteenth century before being decidedly overtaken by France under first Louis XVI and then Robespierre. She could not afford to fail to recognise this. She must catch up.
In this climate, what additional funding the British Army received was mostly focused on copying French breakthroughs. The effort was assisted
by the fact that the Army’s formerly conservative culture had been partially overthrown after the Second Glorious Revolution and Frederick I’s purge of Horse Guards. Reforms under the Commander-in-Chief in the 1790s, Viscount Amherst, continued by his successor Sir Fairfax Washington, had already led to experimentation that would have been considered practically blasphemy before 1751. Washington fought bitterly against Fox’s cutbacks; he had risen to prominence after filling a previous recruitment deficit by giving the American executive power to raise its own regiments, and knew that cutting the number of British regiments now would invariably repeat the crisis in the future. Nonetheless, he was pleased to support the steam projects.
The programme drew most of Britain’s talent in steam technology together, including James Watt and John Wilkinson, who had already studied the French breakthroughs in Paris before the first Jacobin war between Britain and France had broken out. Robert Fulton, rightfully recognised as first among the American steam innovators, also participated, though primarily in the naval side of matters (q.v.). It is likely that Richard Trevithick, the Cornishman whose work on Cugnot-engines had focused on using them to power mining wagons on rails, would have participated – but he had already left the country. Tired of the fact that the consensus was against vehicles on rails, as they would be useless outside the mining industry,[52] he had moved to a country where steam technology was still largely a rumour, and which had no preconceptions about the ‘right’ way to do things: Russia.
The British Army’s steam project was based in northern Lancashire and Cumberland, working out of Carlisle Castle, which was the home garrison base of the 34th (Cumberland) Regiment of Foot. The site was chosen because it allowed early experimentation with the flatter terrain of coastal Lancashire, followed by more realistic all-terrain testing with the moors and mountains of Cumberland. The project, which was generally known simply as ‘Whistler’ for matters of national security, benefited greatly from the espionage efforts of Sir Sidney Smith and his agency, known as ‘the Unnumbered’. This was a double reference to the fact that they were on the books as a numberless regiment of the Army, and that their agents were rumoured to be ‘everywhere, without number’.[53]
Although ‘Whistler’ was several years behind its French counterparts, the programme proceeded fairly smoothly throughout the first few years of the nineteenth century. The same could not be said for the naval side of the project. Unlike the Army, the Royal Navy had supported Frederick fully in the War of the British Succession thanks to Admiral Byng knowing which side of his bread was buttered. This meant the Navy had never been purged or reformed in the Second Glorious Revolution, and essentially not since the First Glorious Revolution over a century before. The conservative establishment led by the Admiral of the Fleet, Sir John Campbell, resisted any attempts that might violate the supremacy of sail. This was a popular position throughout the navy, as many captains were contemptuous of steamcraft. “They require no more training or mathematical skill to operate than a mill loom,” Captain Henry Philipson, son of a Lancastrian industrialist, commented in his journal. It apparently did not occur to Philipson that this might be an advantage. The situation was similar to that in the early 1500s, when early arquebuses and muskets, though individually less powerful than longbows, nonetheless began to dominate because they required a few days’ or weeks’ worth of training to operate rather than a lifetime.
The situation was exacerbated by the fact that the Burkean Secretary at War, Frederick Dundas, was at odds with the Foxite Paymaster of the Forces, Matthew Dalton. Dundas was sympathetic towards the Navy’s conservative views, while Dalton believed (like Lisieux) that steamcraft were an embodiment of personal liberty by their nature, and argued that the Navy’s current leadership rejected them specifically because they were drawn from aristocratic stock. In truth, both were partly right. The Royal Navy had always been the more prestigious of the two services, particularly since the British Army was thought to descend from the Civil War’s New Model Army – there was a reason why at this point it had never been granted the prefix ‘Royal’ – and thus the great families more usually sent their sons to sea.
The result, like most compromises, pleased no-one. Navy cutbacks were politically a liability; the losses of the Second Platinean War had necessitated the Portland Ministry’s ship-building programme, and few were willing to risk a second humiliation. Dalton, however, pointed out that Republican France’s navy remained only a fraction of the size of Britain’s, and now that much of the old Kingdom of France’s navy had been destroyed or defected to the Bourbon regime in the Vendée, the second largest navy in the world after Britain’s was that of the Dutch Republic – with which Britain enjoyed good relations. The Navy, it could therefore be argued, should not be Britain’s first priority.
So, while actual cutbacks were not announced, Dalton sought to punish the recalcitrant Admiralty by denying orders for new ships. The result was that older and obsolete ships were broken up or sold off at their usual rate, with a far smaller trickle of newer ships to replace them. After four years of this standoff, Admiral Campbell died and was replaced by the slightly more flexible Sir Humphry Pellew, former captain of the Enterprize and one of the RN’s few heroes of the Second Platinean War. Pellew was able to chart a more acceptable course, commissioning a sister project to ‘Whistler’ led by Fulton and based in Lowestoft, rather than one of the Royal Navy’s larger bases. The bulk of the Navy establishment remained hostile to the idea, but Pellew was able to secure more ship orders from Dalton thanks to his compromise and the size of the fleet began to recover.
Eighteen months into Admiral Pellew’s tenure, in January 1806, news of the the Cherry Massacre reached London. Fox’s own instincts were to try to play down the affair, reluctant to fight the UPSA, which he saw as waging a noble conflict against the Spanish Bourbon regime-in-exile in the northern Spanish colonies. However, Fox was outmanoeuvred by events. The news had reached Fredericksburg three months earlier and the results had been dramatic. The Lord President, James Monroe, had argued for an intervention and been supported by the Patriot opposition under Lord Hamilton, but the Constitutionalist Party had come apart under the pressure. The party had already shed its more progressive wing as the American Radical Party and was now too influenced by rich southern slaveholders. The remaining Constitutionalists were forced to decide which was more important: the short-term advantage of assuaging the outraged American subject in the street baying for Meridian blood? Or the longer-term importance of serving their constituents, many of whom were members of the settler movement and wanted the Empire of the Indies to collapse under Meridian assault so its northern lands could be seized by the ENA for settlement?
The Constitutionalist MCPs made their decisions, Monroe’s whips losing most of their authority over them, and voted in Monroe’s declaration of war bill. The bill passed, but only due to Patriot support; fully half of Monroe’s MCPs revolted, and the American Radical Party (which favoured the UPSA due to its opposition to slavery) also voted against the bill. The result was that Monroe, after a week of attempting to regain authority over his splintering party and failing, resigned as Lord President. The new Lord Deputy, Michael Burgoyne the 1st Earl of Exmouth, called a general election.
The second American election in three years took place. As was common in this era, polling days varied from Confederation to Confederation and even province to province, but eventually the results were painstakingly collected and were presented in Fredericksburg on November 10th 1805. Back in 1803, Monroe had solved the Cuba Question by making that election a referendum on his performance, and had been returned to power. Now, if he had hoped to duplicate that feat, he failed. Hamilton was returned with a majority of nine.[54]
Helped by a divided opposition, the returning Lord President began his second non-consecutive term by continuing Monroe’s plans for war with the UPSA. He mobilised the American regiments that had been recruited for the first Jacobin War but had never had a chance to se
e action. The American Squadron, which had been blockading Haiti, was returned to its home ports in Charleston, Norfolk and Boston to prepare for the possibility of transporting an American force to South America; the question was whether the Empire of the Indies would be an ally or merely a cobelligerent. If the former, the fleet might round the Cape and deliver an army to Peru to assist General Bernardo O’Higgins’ Bourbon force, while if the latter it was likely that history would repeat itself for the third time and Americans would fight on the shores of the River Plate. The Third Platinean War had begun.
These events in America had serious repercussions in Britain. Realising that the still reasonably popular Monroe had lost his position through failing to maintain the unity of his party, Fox consulted his whips and was forced to admit that public and Parliamentary sentiment ran high for war with the UPSA. With a heavy heart, he assented, and Great Britain joined her former colonies in declaring war on the UPSA on January 18th 1806. For the sake of rapid response, a large part of the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Squadron was deployed to the Americas, with the garrison being stripped from Gibraltar and Malta to provide army reinforcement to the Marines. By this time it had become clear that Hamilton’s second option would be fulfilled; relations between Fredericksburg and the City of Mexico were too frosty to contemplate a full alliance. The Anglo-American fleets rendezvoused at Falkland’s Islands – the place where this conflict had begun, and the place where Pellew had won his fame – and prepared for a showdown with what portion of the Meridian Armada had remained in home waters.
