by Tom Anderson
The Prime Minister bowed his head, and the murmurs of discontent died away as every man in the Chamber strained his ears to hear his quiet coda:
“Then let it be so. Go, and be done with it. But I shall stay. If we must fall… then let us fall like men.”
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From: “Albion’s Peril: The Invasion of England” by Sir Hubert Pendleton, (1951)—
General Hoche seized the docks of the Port of London and immediately began unloading his troops from the fleet, assembling them by regiment. As terrified rumours spread throughout London and men fled in the chaos, Hoche identified the Tower of London as a primary target. Although out of use as a full-scale fortress, it was home to the Board of Ordnance and was well-equipped with cannon that the troops garrisoning it were even now quickly trying to restore to use. Already a few early balls had been sent flying in the direction of Lepelley and Surcouf’s fleet. Furthermore, Hoche’s advisor on English affairs, James Ferguson – a member of the ancien régime’s French Irish Brigade who had managed to survive the Linnaean racial purges – told him of the legend that when the ravens of the Tower died, the Tower would crumble and the kingdom would fall. Hoche was well aware of the power of an image; one had worked against him in the Rape of Rome. After this point he had studied the subject obsessively and in particular the Revolutionary image of L’Épurateur atop the Bastille, which Lisieux had revived as part of his anti-Diamant cultural revolution. Now Hoche foresaw a new image that he could grasp and use to his advantage.
However, taking the Tower would not expand his control of London, and Hoche knew that he had to advance while the British regiments stationed in the city were still knocked back on their heels from shock. He decided once more to hold to the French Revolutionary doctrine: To Hold the Heart. The bulk of the army he thus took under his own command and drove west through the City of London in the direction of Westminster. Almost eight centuries before, the City’s ancestral walls had defeated even William the Conqueror and forced the Normans to concede privileges to the City which survived to that day. But the vast expanse of London had swallowed the City and now those walls were an obsolete joke, contemptuously swept aside by these latter-day imitators of William’s army.
Hoche put his deputy Brigade General Vincent Gabin in command of the second part of his army, four regiments, whose role was to attack the Tower and… fulfil the prophecy. Meanwhile, Hoche’s army marched in column down the streets of the City of London. It was large enough that it had to divide into regiments and march down parallel streets – Hoche, of course, ventured deepest northwards and then turned down Threadneedle Street…
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From: “A History of London” by Francis Dalembord (1935)—
THREADNEEDLE STREET. (FMR. CITY OF LONDON). Originally home to the whorehouses of mediaeval London and called, with charming honesty, Gropecunte Lane. Renamed possibly in seventeenth century… mentioned by Dr Johnson to be ‘now home to a different and less agreeable profession, even more demanding of your purse and likelier still to harbour an unpleasant surprise for the unwary’… Bank of England located there since 1734… New Jonathan’s Stock Exchange, the largest stock exchange in the world in the 18th century, constructed 1748…
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From: “Albion’s Peril: The Invasion of England” by Sir Hubert Pendleton (1951)—
…after the debacle in Italy, Hoche had decided against the use of terror tactics by default, and thus generally did not permit his men to rape, pillage or burn as they advanced (contrary to popular belief) …the exception was as his lead regiment passed the Stock Exchange and the Bank of England at the top of Threadneedle Street, and were attacked by a partially organised mob of bank clerks armed with pistols and swords, determined to defend the sanctity of their temple to Mammon…
…irony was that Hoche would probably not even realise the value of the two buildings had the attack not taken place, having been separated from his advisor Ferguson by the press of the columns…
…after the lead steam-guns had swept the mob with canister and blood stained the marble steps of the Bank of England, Hoche told off one regiment under Lieutenant-Colonel Nicolas Réjane – from whom we receive the modern English verb redgen, to steal or embezzle – and ordered him to sack the Bank and Stock Exchange. “What may be carried, let it be taken back to the fleet,” he ordered, “and what may not, let it be disposed of as best can.” The regiment he picked was, naturally, the most disciplined and ideologically fanatical of those he had to hand, as otherwise it would have degenerated into an orgy of personal theft. Réjane was canny enough to allow each man as much as he could fill his pockets with to keep for himself at the start.
Réjane’s regiment indeed opened the vaults of the Bank of England, removed as much gold as they could, threw the remainder in the Thames or to the crowds of incautious British civilians who had not fled their advance, and burned all the promissory banknotes they could find, as well as the Stock Exchange’s books. In so doing they ruined not only the economy of London, but that of England. The banks of Scotland remained independent,[71] but the Scottish economy was also somewhat dependent on that of England. Great Britain as a whole had the largest economy in the world – emphasis on ‘had’, past tense. With the interconnected nature of global trade, Hoche and Réjane’s few hundred men had effectively triggered a worldwide recession. The world just didn’t know it yet…
…before leaving the City of London, Ferguson had caught up to Hoche and informed him of another legend… as a crowd of curious Londoners looked on in Cannon Street, Hoche approached the Stone of London…
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From: “A History of London” by Francis Dalembord (1935)—
STONE OF LONDON. (FMR. CITY OF LONDON). AKA the Stone of Brutus. Located in Cannon Street.[72] According to legend, brought to Britain by Brutus of Troy, grandson of Aeneas, who gave his name to the island (Bruton -> Britain). The symbolic Heart of the City of London. In Roman Britannia all distances were measured from the Stone. Later in mediaeval times, all the roads of London radiated out from it. It was said that so long as the Stone is safe, so was the city, and he who strikes his sword against the Stone shall rule London…
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From: “Albion’s Peril: The Invasion of England” by Sir Hubert Pendleton (1951)—
…Hoche’s Kligenthal blade struck sparks from the Stone, and one of the mythic moments he had so desired was within his grasp. And as for the Stone itself, it was left abandoned, taken by a member of the mob, and passed out of history until it surfaced once again almost one hundred years later…
…the only real challenge to Hoche’s advance came as they marched through Cheapside and were attacked by the hastily assembled 19th Dragoon Guards. By definition, dragoons were supposed to be capable of fighting on foot. But Hoche was fortunate that this literal description had been dying out over the past few decades and Colonel Robert Burton, the Guards’ commanding officer, attempted to charge the French columns on horseback. On the field of battle, a column of marching infantry would be very vulnerable to cavalry hitting it in its flank, but in the hemmed-in streets this was not possible, and Burton found it akin to attacking a square with an almost infinitely deep side.
The French raised their bayonets and fired their muskets, two or three rounds a minute, a well-oiled killing machine. The horses shied aside rather than charge the bayonets, but unlike an open battle there was nowhere for them to go. Horses screamed and died, along with the men atop them, trampled by those behind or speared on the French bayonets. Burton’s own horse was killed even as he struggled to hold it on course, and the corpse struck the first line of French soldiers, hurling them aside. In a normal battle, that freak eventuality was about the only way cavalry could break a square. But here, the column went on and on, and behind that one line were a hundred more.
Burton died, and his major sounded the retreat. But, in an unintentional Cannae, a second Hoche regiment had heard the sounds of the fighting and had turned back, now marchi
ng up Cheapside. The 19th were trapped between the two approaching walls of death, and were wiped out to the last man and horse, their bloodied colours soon hanging upside-down beneath the red standards of the French…
…it was as Hoche was marching through Holborn that the infamous incident of Joseph Dashwood took place. Dashwood, the man who would be 16th Baron Despencer had his title not been attainted, was the son of Francis Dashwood, the founder of the Hellfire Club. That group had thrived in the mid-eighteenth century, based at the former Medmenham Abbey up the Thames, in which there had been dark rumours of pagan rites and black masses. It counted among its members Benjamin Franklin, from the ENA, John Wilkes and the Earl of Sandwich. Several politicians too radical even for Fox, like Wilkes, belonged to it. The original club had been closed down by an investigation under George III’s reign in 1765, the government bowing to pressure from the Lords Spiritual under their firebrand leader Michael Harworth, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, popularly known as ‘the Witchfinder General’. However, Dashwood the elder had swiftly recreated the club in London, bare streets away from St Paul’s Cathedral as an insult to the Church, and after his death his son had taken over its stewardship. If anything, the rumours had become even wilder, with talk of openly atheistic or Satanic practices along with the paganism…[73]
…Dashwood harboured a grudge against the Church and the Hellfire Club counted among its members those few men in London who would still support a French invasion, when even Fox had been forced to recognise the truth. He was delighted when he learned Hoche was leading the invasion and rode out to meet with the surprised General, who was astonished to learn that the very incident he had done his best to paper over – the Rape of Rome – was specifically what Dashwood admired him for. Dashwood struck a deal; he and his fellow members would help Fox, feeding him intelligence on what they could gather of troop movements through their political contacts, if Fox would allow them to have revenge on the Church by desecrating St Paul’s Cathedral with their own ceremonies. Hoche hesitated, then agreed; he feared a similar backlash in England as had taken place in the Catholic world following the Rape of Rome, but equally knew that these early hours of his invasion were vital and he needed every advantage he could get…
…Hoche’s spectacular victory at the Battle of Charing Cross against the assembled London regiments has partially been attributed to the information Dashwood had fed him… knowing the cavalry holding the right flank, the 15th King’s Hussars, were under the command of the young and headstrong Colonel the Lord John Noakes, Hoche took a leaf out of the book of that other great French invader of England and faked a rout and retreat. Upon the open fields of St James’ Park, the British commander Sir Augustine Molyneux (also the Commander-in-Chief at Horse Guards) hoped to give battle, thus granting more advantages to his cavalry-heavy forces. Hoche staged a brief attack, goading the enemy by waving the captured colours of the 19th, and then told his men to turn and run in loose order.
Molyneux was descended from Guillaume Desmolines, one of the Norman soldiers at Hastings who had turned and ran at William the Conqueror’s command to doom their English opponents, and he was no fool. But Noakes took the bait and charged after Hoche. His men sabred down a few fleeing Frenchmen, but then found themselves in the tight confines of Charing Cross and Hoche closed the trap. This time Cannae was planned ahead of time, and included steam-guns. After this destruction of a second cavalry regiment, Hoche advanced once more, and with the help of his artillery, rolled up Molyneux’s army as the Englishman struggled to reinforce his collapsed right flank. “It is like Caen,” Colonel Marcel Saissons, who had served on Boulanger’s campaign a decade before, remarked to Hoche. “These redcoats break and flee like any German or Spaniard, the only difference is that it is harder to see the bloodstains on their coats.”
Horse Guards Parade fell to the French, and Whitehall was opened up to them…
…meanwhile, General Gabin’s guns pounded away at the Tower of London, smashing down defences that had not been significantly updated since the Middle Ages – it had not been dreamed that London would ever be so threatened again. The moat, long since degraded into a choking morass of sewage, was easily bridged. A few cannonballs rained down from above as the Master General of Ordnance, General William Mayhew, struggled to turn his charge into a real fortress once more. The Tower was home to the London Menagerie and open to the public, for God’s sake! What was he supposed to do?…
…Gabin’s guns toppled the Byward Tower and the outer wall, then the Bell Tower and the Bloody Tower fell to their deadly modern fire… his men stormed the breaches, sustained losses from the brave but undermanned and undergunned Irishmen of the 90th Foot stationed there, and killed the ravens as Hoche had ordered… to be on the safe side, they also blew up the Tower themselves, firing the stocks of gunpowder and ammunition that the Ordnance held there…
…it was a surprise to Gabin’s men when the resulting explosion was rather less spectacular than one might have hoped, and half the White Tower remained standing… however, red-hot mortar fire from Surcouf’s bomb-ships soon dealt with that problem, and the whole of William the Conqueror’s fort broke and shattered before the might of a newer set of French invaders…
…Hoche was ready to march his men down Whitehall when a messenger boy came to him under a white flag of truce. The boy brought a message from Prime Minister Fox, offering to surrender London to Hoche if he would spare the city from the kind of destruction he had meted out on Rome. Hoche would have to come into Ten Downing Street under flag of truce to sign the treaty.
Once more, it seemed Hoche’s reputation for the Roman incident worked for rather than against him. Hoche consulted with Ferguson and Dashwood. Ferguson warned it might be a trap. Dashwood, on the other hand, retorted that Fox was ‘soft’ enough – concerned for the people of London, as he had said in the Parliamentary speech whose rumours had already spread throughout the city – that it could be genuine.
Hoche considered. Obviously his conquest would not stop with London, but if the locals would still obey Fox and he could take it without bloodshed, that would save his precious army some murderous urban fighting, and he would need every man he could get for the campaign deeper into England. How much did he need that clean victory? Was it worth the risk of a trap?
He asked Colonel Saissons whether the rider he had sent into Southwark had reported back. The rider had been sent to look for signs of Modigliani’s Italian army, which should be approaching London from the south.
Saissons replied he had, and there was no sign of Modigliani besides smoke on the horizon; a battle was being fought, a British army must have stood in Modigliani’s way (the truth, as every schoolboy now knows, was very different).
That decided it – Hoche knew he had to keep up his momentum, and that meant the risk was worth it. Nonetheless, he took a sizeable ‘bodyguard’ with him – twenty elite riflemen. He also marched a regiment, the 56e Légère, down Whitehall under the white flag of truce (a painful decision for Jacobin true believers given the white flag’s Bourbon connotations). The streets of Westminster, usually bustling with the business of government, were deserted and eerily silent save for the echoing drumbeat from the French drummer boys. Those whom Fox had named cravens had fled.
The 56e turned down Downing Street and Ferguson pointed out Number 10, which Hoche was surprised to see looked more or less like any other town house. Preceded by some of his twenty bodyguards, aware of the sense of unreality, Hoche knocked at the black door.
The door was open by Fox himself, his expression unreadable. “Let’s get this over with,” he said, in fluent French.
Hoche and Fox sat down across the huge oak table in the Cabinet Room and Fox brought out the hastily scribbled treaty and two pens. Hoche ordered Ferguson, the only one fluent in English, to check it, and it turned out be genuine. Ferguson was then sent back to the troops to tell Saissons that the offer was real. At which point our certain knowledge of what happened in that roo
m naturally comes to an end, and all is speculation.
Perhaps the best known, if melodramatically unlikely, version of events is that of Williams and Stephen in their epic play The Last Days of Liberty…
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From :“The Last Days of Liberty” by Michael Williams and Ronald Stephen (1881)—
HOCHE (as he signs): So this is it. Your city is ours. How does this make you feel, Monsieur Renard?
FOX: I… feel… nothing, General.
HOCHE walks up to FOX’s own drinks cabinet, removes a bottle of port and slurps rudely from it.
HOCHE (proffering it): Would you care for a sip, Prime Minister? As this now belongs to me.
FOX: I… would not.
(pause)
FOX: A nice… cigar, on the other hand…
FOX takes out a cigar and lights it with a safety match.
HOCHE: You are not a man of strong humours, Prime Minister, if you can be so blasé about matters. I know that if British troops invaded Paris, I would not sit around smoking cigars. I would be out there, striking a blow for my country!
FOX: You sound almost disappointed. Would you have me light this treaty as well and burn it?
