The War of Wars (31 page)

The First Lord of the Admiralty was the head of the Admiralty board. During the decades of war with France there were eight of these. At the outset of war the First Lord was the Earl of Chatham, Pitt’s older brother, who showed no great ability in the job and was soon replaced by the competent Earl Spencer. Other politicians who held the post were Viscount Melville, a capable but corrupt Scottish political boss; Thomas Grenville, the able brother of the foreign secretary; Earl Grey, later to become a reforming prime minister; and the competent Charles Yorke.

The two most prominent naval figures were Barham, the extremely skilful organizer of the British navy before the war and, much more controversially, Earl St Vincent, whose abilities as a seaman were among the foremost of his age, but whose crustiness had a knack of making enemies. The commander of the prestigious Channel Fleet at the outset of war was the sixty-eight-year-old Earl Howe, ‘Black Dick’, one of the heroes of the American War. He was succeeded in 1799 by Lord Bridport and then by St Vincent himself the following year. Admiral Cornwallis followed in 1804, and then St Vincent again succeeded after an interval, being followed by the bold and capable George Elphinstone, Viscount Keith.

Admiral Lord Gardner was the most notable commander of the Irish Squadron, and Sir James Saumarez of the Channel Isles Squadron. Keith was a distinguished commander of the North Sea Fleet, while Sir Hyde Parker and the disastrous Lord Gambier commanded the Baltic Fleet.

The hugely important Mediterranean Fleet was variously commanded by the capable but elderly Viscount Hood, another American war veteran, Admiral Hotham, St Vincent, Keith and in 1803 by Nelson himself. He was succeeded by Collingwood, another brilliant sailor, Sir Charles Cotton, and the remarkable sea-captain Sir Edward Pellew in 1811. St Vincent (as Sir John Jervis) had also briefly commanded the West Indies Squadron. The East Indies Squadron was at one stage commanded by Keith.

Of this handful of men, Howe, St Vincent, Keith, Saumarez, Hood, Pellew and Collingwood have come down in history as great commanders, with the genius of Nelson at their head. In spite of their crusty reputation, Britain was well served by her admirals during more than two decades of war. Most of these had reached their positions through ability and were not of aristocratic or moneyed origin, unlike the army commanders; only the system of seniority, which made it difficult for younger men to be promoted because of the large number of longer-serving men with a better claim to the few senior positions available, served to block promotion by ability.

It was the captains, however, who were the glamorous stars of the navy. The two most celebrated were, of course, Nelson and later Thomas, Lord Cochrane. Others included Saumarez, Sir John Warren, Sir Sidney Smith, Sir Richard Keats, Sir Robert Barlow, Eliab Harvey, Sir John Murray, Commander John Wright, Samuel Sutton, Manvers Sutton, Commander Nathaniel Dance, Sir William Hoste, Sir Charles Brisbane, Sir Philip Broke, James Bowen, Edward Pellew, Sir Robert Calder, Charles Stirling, Commodore Sir Home Popham and John Hayes. These men were to be in the front line of the British war against revolutionary France.

The war at sea got off to a slow start, damping down the widespread expectation in Britain of instant victories in the country’s natural medium of war. Lord Howe, commander of the Channel Fleet, picked a cautious course, protecting cargo vessels – some fifty in the first four months of the war – with not a single ship thus accompanied being lost, cruising about to deter French attack, keeping trading lines open and seeking to confine the enemy to port without engaging them aggressively.

This phoney war no doubt fitted in well with Pitt’s refusal to pursue the war with any great enthusiasm in the hope that the French would soon conclude peace. Howe remained at Spithead or at the fleet’s anchorage in the spectacular Tor Bay off the coast of Devon. When he set sail in May, he was forced back twice by gales, although he sighted but did not catch a French squadron. The navy was partly blamed by public opinion for the Dunkirk fiasco.

By the beginning of 1794 there was much greater pressure on Howe to achieve a substantial naval victory. Parliament increased spending on the navy by £4 million to £5.5 million. The total fleet was now 279 vessels manned by around 85,000 men. Howe was bitterly attacked for his tactic of ‘open blockade’ – waiting for the French to emerge from Brest and Rochefort from the safety of British waters, which it was feared, might permit French fleets to escape. However, the old man with the hangdog expression was more astute than he appeared. Nelson himself was to call Howe ‘the finest and greatest sea officer the world has ever produced’.

The reason for Nelson’s tribute was the revolution in naval tactics invented by Howe, which was radically to transform the nature of maritime warfare. Before then British fleet actions were rigorously confined to respecting the line-of-battle. Article 20 of the Permanent Instructions stated insistently that ‘none of the ships of the fleet shall pursue any small number of enemy ships till the main body be disabled or retreat’. The British would traditionally attack aggressively ‘from the weather gauge’ – that is the side the wind was blowing from – because the smoke of battle would therefore drift on to the enemy and because the attacker had the advantage of deciding the timing and length of the action. However, this also meant that lower-deck guns would sometimes fire into the sea, because the wind would tilt the ship, and the men on the upper decks were exposed to enemy musket shot. Moreover, the French, who preferred to defend and conserve their ships, could easily break away from the action, which the British could not do without crossing the enemy fleet.

British commanders during the American War of Independence chafed under the Permanent Instructions and tried to stretch them. But it was Howe who finally issued a new set, giving much greater flexibility to commanders: If the fleet was larger than that of the enemy and some ships found themselves without an opponent, they were ‘to distress the enemy, or assist the ships of the fleet, in the best manner that the circumstances will allow’. In certain circumstances, ships were allowed to pursue their beaten opponents out of the line and, above all, provision was made for breaking the enemy’s line, in a highly effective manner, on the orders of the commander-in-chief Howe was to put his innovation to devastating effect, in the first great naval engagement of the revolutionary war with France.

Howe’s objection to close blockades was that they placed too much wear and tear on ships and men as well as being expensive. He was certainly wrong: as the later blockades were to show, they were not just effective in bottling up the enemy, but in steeling the officers and men for war at sea.

On 2 April 1794 a huge convoy of grain worth £5 million departed Virginia for France (the Americans were taking commercial advantage of the war to supply both sides). Some 117 merchantmen were bearing
deeply needed food supplies to relieve the French people, who were suffering from the collapse of agricultural production following the Revolution. The French squadrons – one from Brest and one from Rochefort – gave the apparently drowsy Howe the slip and escaped to sea. Their commander, Admiral Villaret-Joyeuse, sailed out into the open Atlantic, to meet the convoy and escort it into Brest.

When the two French fleets had escaped, Howe made the second mistake of splitting his forces into one under Admiral Montagu to intercept the colossal convoy while he pursued Villaret-Joyeuse. In fact he should have kept his fleet united and simply gone in pursuit of the French admiral, who was sure to meet the convoy. In his defence he reasoned that the convoy might slip away while the French engaged his fleet – which is in fact what happened anyway.

On 28 May Howe spotted the distant French fleet ten miles away to the south-east on the horizon. He immediately ordered his fleet in pursuit, but could not catch it up. He ordered four of the fastest British ships – the
Bellerophon
, the
Thunderer
, the
Marlborough
and the
Russell –
in pursuit. They soon caught up with the stragglers of the French fleet, a small two-decker and a massive three-decker, the
Revolutionnaire
.

The four British ships in turn engaged this giant, disabling its mizzen mast and forcing it to wear and tack before the wind into a pursuing British ship, the
Audacious
, which although only half its size and gunpower, engaged it closely as night fell. The battle continued to blaze in the darkness, with the smaller British ship fighting with lethal accuracy, losing just three men to the French ship’s 400. The French battleship was almost dismasted, while the British ship was also badly damaged. The fury ceased at about midnight as the two ships drifted slowly apart.

By dawn a fog had descended. When this rose the
Audacious
observed that two other French ships were coming to the crippled
Revolutionnaire
’s help, and the British ship sped to Plymouth to escape. The French ship was towed back to Rochefort. It was a good start for the British.

To the south-west, the British fleet of twenty-five ships continued to pursue the evenly matched French fleet of twenty-six on a parallel course, trying to narrow the distance between them. By noon they
were exchanging fire, hopelessly out of range of one another. Howe now ordered his ships to tack and make directly for the French line – in complete contravention of classical naval tactics, setting a precedent for Nelson years later. As the naval historian Brian Lavery has observed:

Breaking the enemy line could be a very risky manoeuvre. A ship had to turn towards the opposing line, so that her guns would be largely ineffective while the enemy was at full strength. The structure of her bows was weaker than that of her sides, and she could suffer much damage on the approach. However, once she was passing between two ships of the enemy line, she could use both her broadsides, and the enemy could use none. Having passed through, she could engage the enemy on the other side, which was probably unprepared. If she had started with the weather gage she would now have the lee gage, and thus cut off the enemy’s retreat. Breaking the line was a tactic which could win battles, and it did at the Saintes, St Vincent and Trafalgar. Perhaps it would have been too risky if the gunnery of other fleets had been as good as that of the British fleet; but in the given circumstances it was highly successful.

Howe’s flagship, the
Queen Charlotte
, broke through under heavy fire, followed by two others, cutting off the rearguard of six French ships behind. Villaret-Joyeuse promptly wore his own flagship, the
Montagne
, around (a hugely difficult naval task, not like reversing a car) and came to the rescue. Meanwhile the clumsy
Queen Charlotte
took too long to turn back to engage the enemy. They escaped, but now the three British ships were to windward and thus held the initiative to attack.

Night descended again, and then a further fog that lasted twenty-six hours. Lieutenant Codrington, peering into the eerie gloom, remarked to Howe that ‘God knows whether we are steering into our own fleet or that of the enemy.’ British lookouts occasionally glimpsed the tops of sails across the ocean of fog, an alarming and sinister scene. Only on the morning of 1 June did the murk clear – to reveal that the French had drifted some six miles to leeward, and had been reinforced by four more line-of-battle ships, giving them a slight edge over the British. As
thousands of British sailors for the first time contemplated battle in this floating world of rival fleets, it must have seemed an awesome moment: the British had retained the all-important weather gauge.

Howe resorted to controversial battle tactics – with a difference: he mustered his fleet in a perfect line, each ship to engage a French opponent – so far, so conventional – but ordered each to cut through behind his adversary and engage to leeward, so that the British guns, firing upwards into the French hulls, could be used to maximum effect while most of the French shot fell into the sea. Breaking the line in this way was a complete revolution, and an amazing idea for an old man – although perhaps one he had bottled up all his life until command should fall to him. When the two fleets were four miles apart, he gave the order for the fleet to advance.

The leading British ship, the
Caesar
, advanced until within 500 yards of the leading French ship, but then it suddenly hesitated and opened fire, throwing the rest of the British fleet into confusion. Angrily Howe ordered the
Queen Charlotte
to perform the planned manoeuvre as an example to the fleet, and ran up under French fire to behind Villaret-Joyeuse’s flagship, the
Montagne
. Guessing his intention, the
Montagne
slackened its sail, while the next French ship, the
Jacobin
, tried to close the gap. ‘There won’t be any more room to get through,’ exclaimed Howe. ‘My lord, the
Queen Charlotte
will make room for itself,’ replied the ship’s master, Bowen. A terrifying spectacle now presented itself, which caused the French revolutionary commissar to flee to the safety of his cabin: the three huge ships were hurtling towards collision.

It was the
Jacobin
’s captain who broke first: fearing he was about to collide with his own flagship in front, his helmsman turned to leeward in the nick of time, just as Howe’s own flagship reached the stern of the
Montagne
. Codrington, who was a commander on the lower deck, described what happened next:

the ports were lowered to prevent the sea washing in. On going through the smoke, I hauled up a port, and could just see it was a French ship we were passing. I successively hauled up the ports and myself fired the whole of my seven weather guns into her, then ran to leeward and fired the lee guns into the other ship. The weather
guns bore first as we went through on the slant, therefore I had time for the lee guns . . . In passing under the
Montagne
’s stern I myself waited at the bow port till I saw the Frenchman’s rudder (guns 32-pounders, double-shotted), and then I pulled the trigger, the same sea splashing us both, and the fly of her ensing brushed our shrouds. I pulled the trigger of the whole seven guns in the same way, as I saw the rudder just about the gunroom ports.