The War of Wars (76 page)

Mackenzie discovered the secret clause in the Tilsit Treaty by which Napoleon and Alexander agreed to ‘summon the three courts of Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Lisbon to close their ports to the English, and declare war against England.’

His report reached Canning, then in charge of British policy, who promptly acted upon it by issuing an ultimatum to the Danes:

Sir – Intelligence reached me yesterday, directly from Tilsit, that at an interview which took place between the Emperor of Russia and Bonaparte on the 24th or 25th of last month the latter brought forward a proposal for a maritime league against Great Britain, to which the accession of Denmark was represented by Bonaparte to be as certain as it was essential. The Emperor of Russia is described as having neither accepted nor refused this proposal . . . But the confidence with which Bonaparte spoke of the accession of Denmark to such a league, coupled with other circumstances and particulars of intelligence which have reached this country, makes it absolutely necessary that His Majesty should receive from the court of Denmark some distinct and satisfactory assurances either that no such proposition has been made to that court by France, or that, having been made, it has been rejected, and some sufficient security that, if made or repeated, it will meet with the same reception. I am therefore commanded by His Majesty to direct you to demand a conference with the Danish minister, and to request, in a firm but amicable manner, a direct and official answer upon these important points.

On 26 July an expeditionary force of 18,000 men under Lord Cathcart set sail for Copenhagen in twenty-nine transports, accompanied by a British fleet under Admiral Lord Gambier. Among the officers was the young Arthur Wellesley. On 16 August Wellesley’s force landed at Uedboek and pushed towards Copenhagen, routing the defending militia with their ‘long, lank hair and wild rugged features’ at Kioge. Meanwhile Gambier’s fleet opened up on the beautiful old city of Copenhagen and bombarded it for three successive days, setting the old wooden buildings ablaze from end to end in an act of wanton vandalism.

On 7 September, the Danes surrendered and for the loss of 200 men the British seized fifteen Danish line-of-battle ships, nine frigates, fourteen sloops and many smaller craft, as well as ninety troop transports. It was a triumph against virtually non-existent opposition. The expedition aroused controversy in Britain, where the public had not been told of Bernadotte’s intention to seize the Danish fleet. Cathcart and Gambier’s bombardment was crude: a more skilled commander might have found another way of cutting out the fleet.

To many it seemed little more than an act of piracy against a neutral. The reputation of Canning, who had ordered it, suffered accordingly. But it had at least been carried out with an efficiency untypical of previous British military operations on the European landmass. It was to have momentous, entirely unexpected consequences. On 23 September, at a diplomatic reception, an incandescent Napoleon, eager for vengeance, buttonholed the Portuguese minister in one of his contrived rages: ‘If Portugal does not do what I wish,’ he shouted at the Portuguese minister, ‘the House of Braganza will not be reigning in Europe in two months! I will no longer tolerate an English ambassador in Europe. I will declare war on any power who receives one after two months from this time! I have 300,000 Russians at my disposal, and with that powerful ally I can do everything. The English declare they will no longer respect neutrals on the sea; I will no longer recognize them on land!’

The Berlin decree of November 1806 had marked the beginning of an intensification of the economic war between France and Britain. The British had replied with a series of orders in council: these declared a blockade on all ports from which the British were banned. Neutral ships were required to report to British ports and pay duty there before they could proceed to enemy ports. The French had banned all trade with Britain; Britain had now banned all trade with France, except through Britain, upon pain of seizure. Just a month later, on 17 December, Napoleon responded: any neutral which did call in at a British port or was seized by a British ship was deemed to be liable for seizure if it was intercepted by the French at sea or entered a French port. This in turn triggered off fury among the neutrals: the United States, for example, banned all trade with western Europe.

The impact both on Britain and on Europe of this trade war was colossal. Britain’s exports to northern Europe fell from £10 million to £2 million in the space of two years. With the country in the middle of an industrial revolution, it was massively overproducing and desperately needed markets. The warehouses were overflowing. The Spanish empire, which had seemed such a promising target, looked less inviting after the defeat at Buenos Aires. Mills and factories closed and unemployment soared.

The effect was worse in France. An American traveller passing through the country remarked that most of the major commercial towns were destroyed and that there was little traffic on the streets: beggars were everywhere in evidence. Prices soared on the continent:
sugar rose to 5 shillings a pound, coffee to twice that, cotton to seven shillings a pound. As the economic crisis grew ever deeper, Napoleon added insult to injury by selling all British goods seized on the continent, undercutting French producers. Bourrière, the French resident at Hamburg, wrote melancholically: ‘Persons who at this epoch were living in the interior of France can form no idea of the desolation which so savage a measure spread through countries accustomed to live by commerce. What a spectacle offered to peoples impoverished, and lacking everything, to see the burning of articles the distribution of which would have been an alleviation to their sufferings! What a means of attaching conquered peoples, to irritate their privations by the destruction of a number of articles of the first necessity!’

The ferocity with which Napoleon enforced his sanctions further alienated people. In Hamburg itself a German was shot for smuggling in a piece of sugar loaf for his children. Napoleon himself ordered the authorities at St Omer ‘to have the crew and gear of the fishing-boat which communicated with the English seized at once. Make the skipper speak . . . If he should seem to hesitate, squeeze his thumbs in the hammer of a musket . . . Send me a general report on all the smugglers. Could we not get eight or ten millions out of them? What means can we take of bringing them to justice?’ Napoleon instructed the lethal Fouché to bring smugglers to justice.

He also encouraged French privateers to wage war against English and neutral merchant shipping. Some 200 such privateers were operating in the West Indies alone, while Mauritius acted as a privateer base in the Indian Ocean. Underwriters stopped insuring ships trading between Britain and the continent, while insurance rates for American ships trading with Britain were up by half. Collingwood remarked of the sudden drop in merchant traffic in the Mediterranean that ‘it is lamentable to see what a desert the waters are become’. The supply of British luxury goods to continental Europe – spices, coffee, sugar, silks, tobacco, dyes – all dried up.

The inevitable result of the blockade was a huge increase in smuggling. The British showed great ingenuity in continuing to smuggle goods in through the Mediterranean, in particular to southern Italy and along the coast of the Balkans, as Holland did in the Baltic.
Louis Bonaparte infuriated his older brother by openly conniving in illicit trade by his merchant people. He called the Berlin blockade ‘atrocious’ and ‘barbaric’, saying that it would ‘effect the ruin of France and all commercial nations connected with it before it could ruin England’.

The French themselves were forced to connive in the smuggling in order to obtain essential goods. Bourrière recorded that shortly after the Berlin decree was issued, the French government had issued an order to Hamburg for the supply of 500,000 greatcoats, 200,000 pairs of shoes, 16,000 coats and 37,000 waistcoats for the
Grande Armée
. The bulk had to be bought in England. Napoleon would sell illegal licences for the import of sugar. Bourrière in Hamburg reported that in a single night, he allowed in some 60 million francs worth of smuggled goods from England, a third of the sum being passed to Napoleon on the quiet. In the Hanse, a single consignment of smuggled goods made Napoleon some £80,000.

In the long run, the Continental System also turned the Russians against Napoleon. At a stroke Russian merchants had been deprived of their prime market of timber – the Royal Navy. The Russians connived in the sanctions-breaking. Napoleon in 1810 urged Alexander instead to seize 600 ‘neutral’ ships in Russian ports which in reality he claimed were ‘all of them English’. ‘If you abandon the alliance and burn the Convention of Tilsit, war must follow a few months sooner or later.’

Napoleon was furious with Count Tolstoy, the Russian ambassador in Paris, writing:

I have no doubt that Tolstoy writes home many foolish things. At a hunting party a few days ago at St Germain, he was in the same carriage as Marshal Ney; a quarrel arose, and they went so far as to challenge one another. Three things that Tolstoy said on this occasion were noted: the first, that we would soon have war; the second, that the Emperor Alexander was too weak; and lastly, that if Europe was to be divided the Russian right must reach Hamburg and the left Venice. You can imagine what might be said in reply by Marshal Ney, who knows nothing of what is going on,
and is as ignorant of my plans as a drummer of the line might! The fact is that Russia is poorly represented. Tell Romanzoff and the Emperor that I am inclined to favour an expedition to India, that nothing could be easier. If the Emperor Alexander can come to Paris, I would be delighted. If he can come only halfway, put the compasses on the map and strike the middle point between St Petersburg and Paris.

Lisbon and Oporto acted as huge entrepots for British smuggling into the continent and for distribution into Spain. And it was to tiny Portugal that the Emperor now turned his baleful attention.

The mutual blockades, the trade war and the licensed piracy on the seas deeply impacted on both adversaries. But its effect was worse on France because Britain retained mastery of the sea. After Trafalgar, there was a huge decline in British ships being captured. This was because so few French warships ventured out of port. Between 1805 and 1812, including at Trafalgar, some sixty-five French ships of the line and seventy-six frigates were taken, for the British loss of not a single ship of the line. On average just eight British ships were captured by the French every year.

Three British-French naval actions captured the spirit of this continuing war at sea. One was the strange episode of the Diamond Rock, as the British navy colourfully described it. This was in fact a basalt needle jutting vertically out of the sea about a mile south of Martinique some 600 feet high and less than a third of a mile wide. On three sides the rock was sheer. But in 1803 Commander Hood decided to land five guns by means of a cable to an encampment on the rock, manned by 120 sailors under the command of a lieutenant. From the lofty pinnacle the guns repeatedly harassed French shipping.

When Villeneuve’s fleet arrived in the West Indies, with Nelson in hot pursuit in 1805, he was stationed in the great French base of Port Royal, just six miles away, from which he could hear the little outpost’s guns blazing away against passing ships. He sent two ships of the line, two frigates and eleven gunboats to take it. The lieutenant promptly abandoned the two guns at the bottom of the cliff and held out with the other three, a 24-pounder halfway up the rock and two 18-pounders
on the summit. After three days’ relentless barrage, two Britons had been killed and one wounded, while three French gunboats and two rowing boats had been sunk, with a loss of seventy men. Only when they finally ran out of ammunition did the British surrender.

In 1804 a French squadron consisting of the 74-gun
Marengo
, two frigates and two cutters under Admiral Linois came across sixteen plump East Indiamen off Pulo Auro. These were loaded with merchandise, were less fast than the French warships, and possessed only the most rudimentary weapons. They were easy prey, and Linois expected them to seek to escape under full sail. Instead Captain Dance, their commander, arrayed his merchant ships in a line-of-battle and made no attempt to escape, which puzzled the French, who feared a trap. (It was not unknown for warships to disguise themselves as merchantmen and roll out their cannon at the last moment.)

Tentatively, the French tried to cut off the rearmost ships, and Dance veered round to attack the French warships – something of a first for a convoy of merchantmen. When Linois opened fire, the East Indiamen with their few guns went straight for his ships and inflicted so much damage that he had to break off the engagement. Dance signalled a ‘general advance’ and for two hours pursued the French warships. For this extraordinary achievement – a merchant fleet actually driving off a predatory squadron of French warships – Dance was awarded a knighthood.

In November 1806 an even more remarkable engagement occurred: four British frigates, under the command of Captain Brisbane, of the
Arethusa
, were cruising off the island of Curaçao off Venezuela. Brisbane decided to have a go at securing the island, then under the control of the Dutch, who had four warships there and several gun batteries, including Fort Amsterdam at the harbour entrance with sixty guns. The attempt was to be made on New Year’s Eve, when it was calculated the Dutch would be drunk and unaware.

At 5 a.m. the British entered the port of St Ann, and one of the ships grounded, but the
Arethusa
reached the quayside and the British gave the garrison five minutes to surrender or be bombarded. When the time was up the British opened fire on the frigates and boarded. Then
Brisbane landed and took the 300-strong garrison of Fort Amsterdam in ten minutes, including the governor in his nightdress. This was followed by the seizure of Fort Republique. Around 300 Dutch soldiers were taken prisoner and 200 killed or wounded, for the loss of three British dead and fourteen wounded.