by Tom Anderson
As a lucky shot from the Vengeur removed the Mirabilis’ figurehead and scattered the entrails of an ensign across the deck, Parker fiddled with his spyglass, struggling to focus. That ship… another cursed steamcraft… but the pennant, he recognised that!
But it was impossible.
Pennants could be faked, of course. Ships sailed under false colours all the time, though attacking under them was considered close to blasphemy. But for what reason would they fake it? And one couldn’t fake that huge, impossible second fleet following it.
Impossible, perhaps… but it would explain a lot.
Parker had seen the pennant of Admiral Lepelley, who – as he knew well – was stationed in the South of France, at Toulon, commanding a steamfleet which everyone suspected might be aimed at Corsica in the current uncertain climate. That was why Jervis was there with his fleet, to warn them off. Or perhaps it might go to Italy, or Spain… what it would not do is somehow show up in the Channel without at any point passing through the Strait of Gibraltar under the eyes of the Royal Navy.
But it had. Parker would never know why. It was a closely kept secret in France, barely suspected even among the Unnumbered. But Lisieux’s extensive canal-building project, turning the old Canal de Bourgogne into the Canal de l'Épurateur, had transformed the canal; fully completed, wider, deeper. The steam-galleys had a shallow draft. The Canal had made it possible to move them, and similar ships, from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. From Marseilles and Toulon, up the Rhône to the Saône and then to the Yonne and finally the Seine, and the Seine spilled into the Atlantic near Le Havre. Suddenly, Britain’s grasp on Gibraltar, the Key to the Mediterranean, had been rendered superfluous. The French Mediterranean Fleet was here.
Parker knew all was lost. He detailed three brigs to try to escape to bring word to the Admiralty, knew it was a forlorn hope; rowers could not outrun steam. He roused his own men and they managed to pull the vast Mirabilis deeper into the French fleet. Through sheer weight of metal they managed to destroy two more steam-galleys, then a third, even as the Sunderland sank, holed below the waterline. Parker hoped to draw near to L’Otarie and kill Surcouf, even if Lepelley was already behind him on the Tyrannicide. Though the steam-galleys hammered the Mirabilis, her hull – tougher than usual for a British-built ship – and her sheer size defeated them. Where she was holed, her men worked the pumps furiously. She would sink eventually, doubtless, but she would take a terrific bite out of the French fleet before she died.
Then something unexpected happened, as often occurs in war.
L’Enfant de Tonnerre, one of the lead French ships, had lost her captain in the opening seconds of the new war. Now Commander Desaix was in command… and he was not ready. Rather than panicking, though, he settled into a calm, emotionless state, but cold fury burned in his heart. His older brother Jerome had died in Admiral Nelson’s Neapolitan attack on Minorca. Desaix had used his contacts to get assigned to L’Enfant de Tonnerre in particular for this reason. He had an acute sense of irony, and L’Enfant de Tonnerre was not a poetic name.
Now his dark dream had come true. He was in command, and if not Nelson himself, there was Nelson’s old ship before him, sinking steamcraft with its skilfully depressed cannon.
It was time to take revenge.
With a cry of “Pour Jerome! Pour Minorca!”, Desaix ordered full speed ahead, the coalers shoveling on as fast as they could. He aimed the ship’s nose straight at the Mirabilis as though to ram her, and then ordered Lieutenant Vaisson to prepare to open fire.
The Surcouf-class steam galley had been specifically designed so that its standard armament could be swapped out for other weapons, such as a mortar for turning it into a bomb-ship. L’Enfant de Tonnerre, however, was an experimental craft. The Republic was not too proud, after all, to learn from its mistakes, and throw them straight back in the enemy’s face.
Here was close enough, Desaix decided. After all, accuracy was not great in any case… “Tirez!” he cried, and Vaisson and his deputies lit the fuses.
As cannonballs from the Mirabilis crashed around them, as her nose turned the waters of the Channel white, as she raced towards her target… L’Enfant de Tonnerre fired.
Across the French fleet, the sailors looked up from their own tasks, saw the galley’s strike, and cheered: “Vive L’Enfant!”
The idea of war rockets had wound a tortuous path over the years, scarcely less so than the paths they now traced through the air as they exploded almost randomly. From China to Bengal, from Bengal to Mysore, from Mysore to Spain, from Spain to Naples, from Naples to France. Each time, the former had used them in a war against the latter, and the latter had been sensible enough to try to duplicate the feat. Most had succeeded. Naples, with Nelson, certainly had.
Now it was known that France had, also.
The rockets did not sink Mirabilis. But they set her on fire. Her masts creaked and toppled, her furled sails, useless in the windless day, burning to dust. Her varnished deck sputtered with flames. Some of the braver pumpmen, perhaps, tried to put the flames out, but the screaming rockets made even seasoned sailors panic; they had faced mighty broadsides of roundshot, but this was a new and unknown peril.
According to many French observers, one rocket traced an almost perfectly straight and true path from the great asbestos-lined drum installed in L’Enfant de Tonnerre’s bows, striking its target dead-on. The target happened to be Admiral Michael Parker. He simply vanished in a cloud of red, appropriately daubing French Revolutionary colours across Mirabilis’ deck.
The end was not long in coming. The pumps began to fail and the wounds inflicted by the other French ships told, water surging in. Yet the guns kept firing even as she sank, the gunners knowing there could be no escape in the middle of the battle, determined to take as many of the enemy with them as they could. They were the best of the best, the cream of the Royal Navy, and they fought to the end. And, oddly, Mirabilis inflicted some of her most withering blows as she slowly disappeared beneath the beckoning waters of the Channel, her guns now able to fire horizontally at their targets. For example, one cannonball almost achieved Parker’s goal, missing Admiral Surcouf by a hair and slaying a lieutenant standing next to him instead.
Another small cluster of cannonballs struck what remained of L’Enfant de Tonnerre as she too slipped beneath the surface. Mirabilis had fired her last organised broadside almost simultaneously with the rocket attack. Captain Desaix, the rocketman Vaisson and her whole crew were dead. But in a way that only made her legend greater.
Slowly disappearing beneath the waves, across the French fleet, the sailors now removed their hats and chanted: “Adieu L’Enfant!”
Now Admiral Surcouf watched Mirabilis sink. She was the last of the British ships.
Then he spoke.
“The way is open,” he said. “For the first time in a hundred years… the way is open.”
Chapter #67: So Here It Comes, The Sound Of Drums…
“If you would seek the true terror in the night, throw away your library of thrillers and neo-vandalic romances and turn back to your childhood. There is no darkness quite so potent as that behind the apparently innocent nursery rhyme.”
- Norman Prendergast, forward to English Folklore (1972)
*
From: “Albion’s Peril: The Invasion of England” by Sir Hubert Pendleton (1951)—
The impossible had happened.
Jean de Lisieux had gambled, and he had won. All that work, the expenditure of hundreds of thousands of républicaines,[61] the countless political prisoners who had been worked to death as slaves, the expansion of the Burgundian Canal and the frantic construction programme to replace and improve the steamships destroyed by Nelson at Mahon – it had all been worth it. As Surcouf had said, “Let us be masters of the Channel for six hours and we are masters of the world.”[62]
Now that mastery had been seized. The efforts of Admiral Parker had hurt Surcouf’s fleet, perhaps hurt it sufficiently to p
revent an invasion if it had been alone. But it was not alone. The canal system meant that the Mediterranean fleet of Lepelley could be transported across France to the Channel. Even if Parker had not sent ships to shadow the much smaller force under Villeneuve assaulting the Dutch Republic, what was left of the temporarily under-strength British Channel Fleet could not have stopped the French. A narrow opportunity had arisen and Lisieux had seized it with both hands.
Of course it was to be expected that the British would frantically start calling their fleets back at the speed of a messenger, so one might suppose that the French would land their troops immediately to avoid a latter interception. However, that part of the mission was the responsibility of Lazare Hoche. Hoche: mercurial, arrogant, opportunistic, with questionable loyalties – and perhaps the best general of his generation.
And above all, reckless.
Hoche knew what his armies would face. Though an invasion of England had seemed not to be on the cards for the foreseeable future, every general and admiral worth his rank in France had studied British defensive preparations. These had lagged behind during Fox’s ministry, cut back as part of the government’s grand programme to pay back the national debt,[63] which would ultimately be rendered moot. However, the British coast was scarcely undefended. Martello forts had been constructed to a modern design along the south coast by the Portland-Burke and Rockinghamite ministries, and generous Royal Ordnance policies ensured they were well equipped with powder and shot. Larger fortifications manned by regiments of line troops had been built or renewed, with Dover Castle being ringed by a new network of modern bastions and a newly constructed elaborate underground barracks complex. A single line of semaphore towers linked the fortifications, far inferior to France’s Chappe network, but nonetheless meaning that an attack on the south coast would become known to Portsmouth within the hour, and to London within three or four, given time to send a messenger on a fast horse.
An attack on the south coast was therefore unlikely to succeed. The British forts would hamstring an attempt to break out into the interior of Southern England, and the semaphore system meant that Britain could call out her garrisons, concentrate them into an army and surround the French force. Though Britain’s army was small compared to the Continental standard, Hoche was limited by the capacity of his fleet and had only 60,000 men at his command. Given time to assemble, British troops would outnumber his army – and their performance in the war seven years before had proved that they could stand their ground against France’s finest.
Therefore, with a characteristic flash of strategic insight, Hoche tried a bluff. He landed 8,000 of his men on the Kentish coast between Dungeness and Folkestone, using his steam-galleys’ flat bottoms to take advantage of beach landings not accessible to sailships. These men were not chosen randomly; he picked the two Italian regiments that had remained loyal to him when his Republic collapsed in the wake of the Rape of Rome. Composed solely of hardbitten veterans who followed Hoche because of his charisma, not his cause, the two regiments were commanded by Brigade General Tomaso Modigliani.
Modigliani was a Savoyard, one of the first Italian soldiers to join Hoche’s army after being captured in battle as a conscript. Seven years was a long time, and he had eventually become Hoche’s effective second-in-command. Hoche respected the man’s ingenuity and willingness to take risks, and also found his complete lack of moral compunction useful. There was a reason why Modigliani and his men had been unmoved by the Rape of Rome and the general despoilment of the central Italian countryside by Hoche’s hired Jacobin troops.
So, to that end, Hoche landed Modigliani’s men and added a token artillery force, ten twelve-pounder cannon mounted on Cugnot steam wagons. They had their orders. Not to strike the British fort at Shorncliffe[64] or the smaller fortifications dotted along the Kentish coast, but to surge forth into the interior, using the Guerre d’éclair, aiming for Ashford, Maidstone and ultimately Chatham. Hoche understood something of the attitudes of the British Admiralty and knew that Chatham was their sacred cow, its famed impenetrability a measure of their prestige. The Admiralty had suffered badly in the fiasco of the Dutch raid on the Medway over a hundred years before, when the Dutch had burned an English fleet in dock and blown up both the forts supposedly protecting it. Since then, Chatham had become increasingly fortified, even as the importance of the shipyards had grown.
But, of course, all of Chatham’s defences were aimed at repelling an attack by sea, an enemy fleet sailing up the Medway or the Swale. A strike across land would not have been planned for, no-one could have predicted it – particularly when the defence of Chatham was masterminded by the Royal Navy, not the British Army. If Hoche had landed his entire army and marched it there, they could quite possibly take the forts from the south and then burn whatever ships were docked there. Hoche gambled that in the wake of Parker’s defeat, the Admiralty would jump to prevent a second disaster.
Of course, Hoche had not landed his whole army, but that was where Michel Sauvage came in. The little, quick-witted Gascon had been the Italian Latin Republic’s equivalent of Britain’s Sir Sidney Smith, serving Hoche capably in the capacity of spymaster. In no small part, it had been his work that had kept Italian Kleinkrieger activity to manageable levels, at least until the Rape of Rome. Now he and his subordinates went to work, going ahead of Modigliani’s men, posing expertly as Englishmen, spreading rumours of the French’s ferocity, their destructiveness – and their intended target.
Modigliani, on the other hand, had the task of trying to make it look as though his eight thousand men were in fact almost ten times that number, Hoche’s entire force. He achieved this through a mixture of subterfuge – issuing fake regimental colours for a wide range of French regiments and having his men constantly exchange them – and brutality. The sleepy Kentish village of Lympne was the first British settlement to feel the bloody rampage of the revolutionary soldier, the dark fire that had stained Europe red from Portugal to Bohemia. On Modigliani’s orders, Lympne was burned to the ground, though the Italians were careful to allow a small number of stunned villagers to escape to tell the tale. Even as the Italians marched to the pace set by the Guerre d’éclair doctrine, rumour nonetheless outran them. With this sudden stab of violent fury into the heart of Kent, the psyche of the locals was thrown back in confusion and horror. Yes, many of them knew about the fortifications on their coast, but no-one had ever seriously believed that they would be invaded, by the French or anyone else. Security from invasion was the hard bedrock of the English character, the idea that since 1066 the island had almost magically been protected from invasion. The legend of the Spanish Armada had sealed it into the public consciousness: God breathed and they were scattered.
Understandably, the abrupt collapse of that assumption resulted in chaos. Stories were panted out in frantic voices – and soon whizzing through the air via semaphore paddles – that told of a million Frenchmen rampaging across the Weald, each ten feet tall, with the horns and tail of a demon, and biting the head off an English baby with one hand even as they torched Canterbury Cathedral with the other. The sheer suddenness of the attack rocked the establishment to the core. Even those Britons who would normally have had the sense to treat the stories as the hyperbole they obviously were now began to panic. The situation was so unexpected, so unprecedented, that no-one knew what to believe. Most of those who remained calm did so because they were certain the story was a hoax.[65]
And so, just as Hoche had hoped, the government response was just as confused. Fox was predictably one of those who dismissed it out of hand as a hoax when the story reached London, while Richard Burke frantically tried to assemble a straight consistent account of events from the messengers streaming into London. The only member of the Cabinet who took a measured approach to the news – to believe that an invasion had happened, but not on the scale that the stories suggested – was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Bone. He had lived through a French invasion of his own homeland, C
orsica, and knew better than any Englishman what an invasion looked like. But Bone had only been in his post for two years, and he was unable to make his views heard.
The Admiralty’s news of the invasion was perhaps the best available in England at that point. This was partly due to the semaphore network, but also for a reason that no-one could have expected…
*
From: ‘Naval Mythology of the British Isles’ by Dr Walter Walker (1983)—
DRAKE’S DRUM. A snare drum which Sir Francis Drake carried with him in his voyages around the world. As he lay on his deathbed in the West Indies, he asked for the drum to be brought back to England. The legend which originally surrounded the drum was a variant of the classic ‘king under the mountain’ tale found elsewhere with King Arthur or, on the Continent, Barbarossa or Charlemagne; when England was threatened, if the drum was beaten, Drake would return from heaven with a fleet to defeat the invaders.
Strangely, this legend has little to do with the drum’s actual purported behaviour. Rather than being beaten by a drummer to summon Drake in time of peril, instead the drum beats itself when England is threatened, calling the nation to war. This has been reported by a great many people over the years, some of whom disassembled the drum to try and find out how it worked, to no avail. Some mysteries are, perhaps, better left unsolved.
