The War of Wars (61 page)

Latouche-Tréville, in command of twelve line-of-battle ships, accused Nelson of ‘running before him’, much to the latter’s amusement. From May 1803 to August 1805 Nelson left his ship just three times, for less than an hour on each occasion; small wonder the admiral’s gait was far more accustomed to the rolling of his ship than to the firmness of dry land. The blockades vastly tested and improved British seamanship, as well as lowering the quality of French sailing, for their ships were kept bottled up in port for months at a time. When the French fleet tried to slip away from Toulon in a gale, they were immediately driven back into port. Nelson commented wryly: ‘These gentlemen are not accustomed to a Gulf of Lyon gale, which we have buffeted for twenty-one months and not carried away a spar.’

While Britain anxiously anticipated an invasion, Napoleon had changed his mind several times as to how to stage this. During the autumn he had declared confidently that all he wanted was a calm Channel and winter fog – until it was pointed out to him that his force might get lost in a fog. Calm waters were anyway unlikely to last for long during the winter. The sheer size of the invading fleet would require as many as three tides to carry it from French ports, which raised the prospect of part of the force wallowing at the mercy of the British ships and the weather as it waited for the rest to come out. Reluctantly Napoleon abandoned his idea of staging an invasion in winter.

He conceived a new plan: luring the British fleet to go in chase of one of his fleets, so that another fleet might accompany the invasion force in the spring or summer. He also had 20,000 troops on hand in Brest ready to invade Ireland. Cornwallis was forced to stay off Brest or further out in the Atlantic, anticipating an attack on Ireland. Meanwhile Latouche-Tréville’s ships in Toulon would escape Nelson’s blockade, move eastwards to lure Nelson in pursuit, then veer west and escape through the Straits of Gibraltar, defeating the British squadron blockading Brest and, reinforced from that port, acting as an escort for the attacking armada.

Like so many of Napoleon’s naval plans, it had all the mathematical precision of a land manoeuvre, but failed to allow for the unpredictability of naval warfare – the surprise movement of enemy fleets, the difficulty in locating them, the changes in the weather and tides that could throw the best laid ideas into disarray. This plan was drafted in January 1804, but it was soon overtaken by unpredictable events.

But the very capable French Admiral Latouche-Tréville suddenly fell dead from a heart attack, as he walked up to the observation point at Toulon, as he did nearly every day, to look out for the British fleet. Admiral Villeneuve, of whom Napoleon rightly had a far lower opinion, took his place. A new variant of the strategy evolved: the Brest Squadron under Admiral Ganteaume was to emerge, sail far out into the Atlantic and then sweep back to land 18,000 men in Northern Ireland, which was believed to be ripe for insurrection.

Meanwhile the Toulon and Rochefort fleets were also to break out, liaise in the West Indies and attack the British there. Napoleon believed that the British would despatch thirty ships of the line to defend their West Indian possessions in pursuit of the twenty French ships. Meanwhile Admiral Ganteaume’s fleet was to curve back around northern Scotland to convoy the invasion landing craft to England, while the British fleet was still messing about in the West Indies.

This fantastic scheme was ingenious and over-complex. It required far too many variables to go according to plan. Napoleon hesitated and, as the summer passed, he assembled no more than three-quarters of the 130,000 troops he needed, along with 1,100 invasion barges. He decided the opportunity had passed that year, and resolved to try again the following summer. Pitt emerged from retirement to the House of Commons, where he gave a stirring call to arms:

We are come to a new era in the history of nations; we are called to struggle for the destiny, not of this country alone but of the civilized world. We must remember that it is not only for ourselves that we submit to unexampled privations. We have for ourselves the great duty of self-preservation to perform; but the duty of the people of England now is of a nobler and higher order . . . Amid the wreck and the misery of nations it is our just exultation that we have
continued superior to all that ambition or that despotism could effect; and our still higher exultation ought to be that we provide not only for our own safety but hold out a prospect for nations now bending under the iron yoke of tyranny of what the exertions of a free people can effect.

The hapless Addington resigned the following day. The King sent for Pitt and it seemed at last that a coalition government, a ministry of all the talents, was to be formed under Britain’s most resolute political leader. A ‘large comprehensive administration’ was drawn up which would include Fox and Fitzwilliam, as well as Grenville as Lord President of the Council and Grey as secretary of war. But inexplicably Pitt, although he held a strong hand and should have been able to dictate to the erratic old King, hinted that he would not insist on Fox and Grenville, whom the monarch detested, joining the government. He suggested that the King should ‘understand distinctly that if after considering the subject, he resolved to exclude the friends both of Mr Fox and Lord Grenville, but wished to call upon me to form a government without them, I should be ready to do so, as well as I could, from among my own immediate friends, united with the most capable and unexceptionable persons of the present Government; but of course excluding many of them, and above all, Addington himself, and Lord St Vincent.’

Thus Pitt, no longer himself the bold figure of old and visibly ailing, gave the sometimes mad King latitude to dictate the shape of his ministry: and he biliously refused to admit Fox, saying he would prefer civil war. Grenville, now in honour bound to his fellow Whig, Fox, refused to join in sympathy. Pitt was bitter towards his cousin: ‘I will teach that proud man that in the service and with the confidence of the King I can do without him, though I think my health such that it may cost me my life.’ He was deprived not only of Britain’s greatest orator but of his invaluable foreign secretary and closest counsel in government at the time when Britain most needed both.

The new cabinet was so weak, apart from Canning and Castlereagh, that it was dubbed ‘the administration of William and Pitt’. Pitt resumed the office of prime minister on the same day, 18 May
1804, that Napoleon was proclaimed Emperor. The scene was thus set for a duel to the death between the staunchest opponent of revolutionary France and the new dictator that had throttled the Revolution and channelled its energies into French overseas expansion.

Pitt appointed Dundas, now Lord Melville, his able but corrupt party manager, as First Lord of the Admiralty. He immediately took steps to reverse St Vincent’s anti-corruption policy, but he was soon censured for corruption himself in the House of Commons and Pitt lost one of his closest lieutenants.

The huge burden of defending Britain’s shores against Napoleon’s colossal war machine was now in the hands of a sick man. Pitt rose to the task magnificently. He resolved to take the war to France. In October and November of 1804 Boulogne was bombarded with rockets. Pitt also took the war to Spain, whose neutrality was a cover for an alliance with France. Spain had already paid some £3 million towards French naval costs and offered fifteen line-of-battle ships and 40,000 troops in support. The British demanded that Spain close her dockyards to French shipping. Then in September four British frigates intercepted four Spanish treasure ships returning from the Spanish colonies off Cape Santa Maria. The Spanish resisted: one ship blew up and the other three were captured with £1 million aboard. On 12 December Spain declared war upon Britain and committed twenty-five ships of the line and eleven frigates to the fight against Britain. On paper this enormously strengthened Napoleon’s position; but Pitt had been right in regarding the Spanish as effectively already part of the enemy war effort.

Pitt’s third offensive was to try and renew the land war against Napoleon. Once again he trawled the European continent for allies. First in his sights was Russia under its new young Tsar, Alexander. By November the latter, appalled by the murder of the Duc d’Enghien, was moving towards an alliance, and was tempted further by Pitt’s offer of £1.25 million for every 100,000 troops Russia put into the field. An Anglo-Russian alliance was formally signed at St Petersburg in April 1805.

Alexander, the grandson of Catherine the Great, had as his main aim a revival of the policy of expansionism. He wanted Russia to be in the
front rank of Europe. Both Britain and France before 1792 had viewed Russian expansionism as the main threat to European peace, but now Pitt judged it could be well employed defeating the more immediately aggressive French expansionism.

The next target for Pitt’s proactive diplomacy was Austria. Both the Emperor Francis and his best soldier, his younger brother the Archduke Charles, favoured peace, partly to reinvigorate the Austrian army. Public opinion in Vienna was favourable to peace. But in February 1803 the French had imposed terms on Germany’s western statelets, which Austria had long regarded as being within its sphere of influence. Forty-one historic free cities and sixty-six ecclesiastical principalities were done away with and replaced by a handful of bigger entities loyal to France. Austria was fobbed off with three small prince-bishoprics along the Tyrol. The Prussians were given a majority in the electoral college that chose the Holy Roman Emperor, which would have the effect of excluding the Habsburgs from that honorific title. Austrian irritation turned to outright anger when Piedmont and Elba were seized.

This was followed by Napoleon’s coronation, which outraged the Austrian court as presuming to give the Corsican upstart the same rank as their Emperor. As already noted, Beethoven, who had so admired Napoleon’s progressive credentials that he had dedicated his Third Symphony to him, struck out the dedication, calling it the Eroica instead. Austria became increasingly irritated as Napoleon appropriated the sword of Charlemagne, as well as a crown with the Charlemagne circlet, and secured the Pope’s attendance at the coronation. Austrian diplomats, horrified at this upstaging of their Emperor, with Napoleon by now claiming Charlemagne as King of the French rather than the Germans, responded with derision that at the coronation ‘one sister [of Napoleon] sulked, another held smelling salts under her nose and a third let the mantle drop; and this made things worse because it then had to be picked up.’

Napoleon them went a stage further. He travelled to Milan to become King of Italy on 26 May. For this occasion he wore Charlemagne’s 800-year-old crown, taken from Monza. This was effectively an annexation of much of Italy and contrary to the Treaty of Luneville.
It is hard to see Napoleon’s behaviour in any other light than that he was spoiling for a fight. He took pleasure in bullying Austria and did not care if the Austrians were finally provoked into standing up for their interests because he was sure he would win. By now even Austria’s feeble court party was fuming with impatience and had decided this was the right time to strike, with Napoleon’s main army encamped outside Boulogne in preparation for the invasion of Britain. The news that Alexander’s Russia was preparing to join Britain in war against Napoleon finally tilted the balance.

On 8 August 1805, all Pitt’s frenzied diplomatic efforts bore fruit: the Third Coalition was formed. Sweden and Naples also decided to join. Prussia hinted it might do so at a later date. This time it seemed the French had taken on too much. By provocation they had turned Britain against them. By abducting and murdering the Duc d’Enghien, they had aroused the ire of the Tsar. By crowning himself King of Italy, Napoleon had finally pushed the Austrians to breaking point.

This time the allied forces seemed overwhelming. The Austrian army was 250,000 strong and had never been completely defeated by the French in battle. The Russians had 200,000 at their disposal, while the other allies could assemble another 50,000 between them. Britain would continue to contribute its naval forces.

France faced war on several fronts: a Russo-Swedish attack from Pomerania; a Russian force of 40,000 to support the Prussians – if they chose to join the coalition – moving along the northern frontier towards Hanover and Hall; an Austrian thrust under Archduke Frederick with 90,000 men into Bavaria, where it would be reinforced by a Russian army of some 50,000. Further south Archduke Charles was to command 100,000 men to secure northern Italy; he would then join up with a smaller force of 20,000 men under Archduke John in the Tyrol. By the summer of 1805 Pitt had thus assembled the mightiest coalition ever to face France on land. It had been a remarkable achievement for a sick man, assembled in little more than a year.

Elsewhere round the globe, the tide also seemed to be turning Britain’s way. The withdrawal of the French fleet from the Caribbean enabled Samuel Hood and General Grinfield to reoccupy St Lucia and Tobago and, later, Demerara, Berbice and Essequibo – the Dutch
settlements which had been restored to Holland at the Peace of Amiens. Surinam was soon taken too. The French army in Haiti submitted to the British, so as not to be slaughtered by Christophe’s slave army. Only the large islands of Martinique and Guadelupe remained French, along with Curaçao which succeeded in beating off a British attack.

Meanwhile General Decaen, reaching India, had demanded the fort and enclave of Pondicherry under the terms of the Peace of Amiens. The British governor-general, Lord Wellesley, refused, even before news of the outbreak of hostilities between Britain and France reached him. Wellesley promptly struck out at the Marathas, the central Indian rulers whom the French had been courting in the autumn of 1803. After two spectacular campaigns in different regions he secured the ancient Moghul capital of Delhi, along with Hindustan and the Deccan. Meanwhile, his thirty-four-year-old younger brother Arthur Wellesley won a triumph at Assaye in September 1803.