The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (11 page)

Despite the misgivings of the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, the war lobby and its extra-parliamentary supporters in the press and London coffee houses got their way. A war, begun in anger, resolved itself into a series of blows delivered randomly against Spain’s empire and trade.

Almost immediately war had been formally declared, Admiral Edward Vernon, who as an MP had called for the overrunning and occupation of Spain’s American empire, took command of a fleet under orders to harry Spanish trade and colonies in the Caribbean. What was in effect a war of smash-and-grab raids opened on an encouraging note with the capture of Porto Bello. Further attacks were launched against Cartagena (on the coast of modern Colombia, Havana and Santiago de Cuba during the next two years, but were bloodily repelled. By the end of 1742 hopes of quick, profitable victories had evaporated.

From the start, British strategy had been flawed. To have any chance of success, assaults on Spanish strongholds in the Americas required their isolation, which could only be achieved by a blockade of Spain’s Atlantic ports. Operational difficulties, most notably the inadequate base facilities at Gibraltar, prevented the Mediterranean fleet from stopping the flow of reinforcements and munitions from Spain to its colonies.

Climate and disease also played their part in frustrating the Caribbean adventure. Tobias Smollett, a surgeon’s mate during the siege of Cartagena in 1741, described the action in his novel
The Adventures of Roderick Random
(1748). He drew a brutally realistic picture of the miseries suffered by ordinary soldiers and seamen, in particular their diet:

… our provision of putrid salt beef, to which the sailors gave the name of Irish horse; salt pork of New England, which, though neither flesh nor fish, savoured of both; bread from the same country, every biscuit whereof, like a piece of clockwork, moved by its own internal impulse, occasioned by myriads of insects that dwelt within it; and butter served out by the gill that tasted like train-oil thickened with salt.

The North American colonies were clearly doing well from the war. To noisome victuals were added the torments of the weather, and what proved to be the final blow for the ill-fed sailors came with the onset of the West Indian rainy season which:

… conspired with the stench that surrounded us, the heat of the climate, our own constitutions impoverished by bad provisions, and our despair to introduce bilious fever among us, which raged with such violence, that three-fourths of those whom it invaded died in a deplorable manner.

Fatal illnesses, of which scurvy was the commonest, killed the same proportion of the crews of Admiral Sir George Anson’s flotilla during its four-year cruise around the world between 1740 and 1744. Anson, an extremely able and intelligent commander, had been ordered to intercept Spanish shipping off the western shores of South and Central America. He returned in his one surviving ship, HMS
Centurion,
with £1,250,000 worth of plunder, nearly half of it taken from the Manila galleon which had been captured off the Philippines.

By the time that Anson reached Portsmouth, the war against Spain had become a general European conflict in which Britain, the Netherlands and Austria were fighting Spain, France and Prussia. The perilous military situation in Flanders and the need to defend George II’s province of Hanover demanded a large commitment of British troops to the continent. There was a further call on manpower in 1745, when Prince Charles Edward (the ‘Young Pretender’), backed by French troops and cash, landed in Scotland. The last Jacobite insurrection was a desperate gamble from start to end; the Prince’s only substantial support lay in the Highlands of Scotland, where, after an excursion as far south as Derby, his army was cornered and overcome at Culloden in April 1746. Throughout the campaign he had been denied further French assistance by the Royal Navy.

The Jacobite uprising, which caused some temporary and highly exaggerated alarm in England and the Lowlands of Scotland, was a distraction from a war where France was now identified as the main enemy. A methodical strategy was evolved, aimed at the extinction of her overseas trade and the occupation of her settlements in North America. A squadron of men-o’-war was also despatched to assist the East India Company in its miniature campaign against French enclaves on the Coromandel coast and to interrupt France’s Asian commerce.

In February 1745. two ships of the line, the
Deptford
and
Preston,
fell in with and took three French vessels returning from China as they sailed through the Sunda Straits. There was general rejoicing on both men-o’-war at the prospect of prize money beyond the dreams of even the most avaricious naval officer. One, Henry Clerk of the
Preston,
spoke for all in a hurried letter to his parents in Scotland, which was delivered to a passing Dutch East Indiaman for the first stage of its journey. He also gave them an uncomfortable reminder that the pursuit of easy wealth in the tropics had its drawbacks too:

We have had very good luck since we came to this country, having taken three French China ships at one time Richly laden, but alas I wish I could say so much for my Health for I have been sick since I came round the Cape [of Good Hope]. I hope the three prizes will be able to support me for some time … or God grant me my health. I believe my Prize money will amount to 3 × 4,000 Pounds sterling and a little more luck will be sufficient to buy a little estate somewhere near Cramond.
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In America, the war opened with a successful attack on Cape Breton Island at the mouth of the St Lawrence and the capture of Fort Louisbourg in 1745 by a force which included a 4,000-strong New England volunteer contingent. Within a few months, preparations were in hand to establish a naval base at Fort Louisbourg which would serve as a springboard for amphibious operations against Quebec.
9
These had to be abandoned when a French relief force arrived the following year.

The setback in Canada, like those in the Caribbean, exposed the need for a global naval strategy. Before any offensive could be mounted in America it was essential that the French or, for that matter, the Spanish were in no position to send reinforcements to their colonies. To guarantee this quarantine, the Royal Navy would either have to bottle up its adversaries’ fleets in their home ports or engage them as soon as they emerged. A blockade required constant patrols, an activity that caused enormous wear and tear to hulls, masts, spars and sails, not to mention crews. By 1745, a system had been adopted by which a ship undertook a fixed period of duty with the blockading squadron and then returned for refitting, while its place was taken by another which had just been refurbished. This method of maintaining a continual presence in the western Atlantic worked, so long as the Royal Navy could call upon superior numbers of warships and efficiently managed dockyards.

The results of this strategy were highly encouraging. In May 1747, a French squadron attempted to break the blockade and was caught off Cape Finisterre by a larger force under Anson’s command. He had used the past months of watching and waiting to exercise his captains and men in a new battle tactic, known as the general chase. It was a simple manoeuvre which required expert seamanship, discipline and skilled gunnery. The British line-of-battle ships (that is, 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th rates armed with sixty or more cannon) approached their adversaries in line astern. As the leading British battleship came alongside the rearmost French, it fired a broadside and then sailed on, firing in turn at each opposing vessel as it passed along the line. This pattern was repeated by each of the succeeding ships.

This technique worked; six French battleships were sunk or taken by Anson’s squadron. Further proof of the new tactic’s efficacy came in October when Rear-Admiral Sir Edward Hawke engaged a West Indies-bound French squadron, again off Cape Finisterre. Six of the eight French battleships were sunk or taken and the convoy of 250 merchantmen they were escorting was scattered. Many of these were later captured, for Hawke had had the foresight to send a sloop to Port Royal to warn the naval authorities there that a French convoy was heading in their direction.

These two victories vindicated the new strategic formula for isolating France, and the general chase as a battle winner. They were also a sign of the emergence at the top of the navy’s hierarchy of a new breed of senior commander. Anson and Hawke were admirals who were prepared to snatch at whatever opportunity came their way to force a battle, even if this meant taking risks. Both understood that British naval supremacy could only be maintained if individual commanders were willing to get to grips with the enemy’s battlefleets whenever they left port. It was, of course, never possible to predict the outcome of a battle, but both Anson and Hawke rightly believed that the better training, experience, discipline and stamina of their crews would always give them a vital edge over the French.

1747 saw British maritime supremacy preserved. Elsewhere the war had become a stalemate for, while unable to defend their colonies, the French had occupied most of the Austrian Netherlands (modern Belgium). The following year, the exhausted combatants agreed the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle which did little more than restore the pre-war
status quo,
although Britain had to sacrifice Louisbourg in order to secure the removal of French forces from the Low Countries. Aix-la-Chapelle was, in fact, an armistice and, justifying it to the Commons in 1749, Henry Pelham predicted further conflict with France. Like Rome and Carthage, the two powers were irreconcilable rivals and only the navy could save Britain from the latter’s fate. ‘I am afraid’, he told MPs, ‘we may be taught by experience, that our navy is not invincible; and if that should ever happen our navigation, our commerce, our independency, will be at an end.’
9

The Prime Minister was unduly pessimistic, but correct in his view of Britain’s total dependence on her navy for survival as a great power. Nearly sixty years of intermittent war against France had shown both the advantages and limitations of maritime supremacy; alone, it had not been the key to victory, but it had been the means of preventing defeat. Moreover, the general strategy which had been devised after 1745 showed that, properly used, command of the world’s seas offered Britain the means of expelling the French from North America and possibly India, endeavours that had been forestalled by events in Europe and the peace. Nevertheless, what had been achieved during the war bred a new and aggressive self-confidence within the navy which was spreading to the country at large despite the disappointments in the Caribbean. Anson and Hawke emerged from the war as heroes and their audacious fighting spirit enthused their subordinate captains, men like George Rodney and Edward Boscawen who succeeded them in high command during the next twenty years. The two admirals came to embody the superior qualities of the navy, which were celebrated in a popular patriotic ballad, written in the late 1770s to commemorate the commissioning of ships named after them:

These two noble heroes, whose names our ships bear,

Make the
Spaniards
to tremble, the
Frenchmen
to fear,

Secure of success, then, your fortune ne’er balk,

But enter on board the
Lord Anson
and
Hawke.

Let the wise politicians of
France
and of
Spain

Threat to take from
Great Britain
her rule of the main,

Their plate ships shall pay for such arrogant talk

If they come in sight of the
Lord Anson
and
Hawke.

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Tis to Glory we Steer: Gains and Losses, 1749–83

The peace of Aix-la-Chapelle settled nothing: Anglo-French commercial and colonial rivalry persisted and deepened after 1748. The French remained convinced that their antagonist’s long-term aim was to stifle their trade and expropriate their colonies. Britain continued to fear a concert between the Bourbon Louis XV and his Spanish cousin which would bring their fleets into a dangerous conjunction. Despite the late war, Britain was becoming richer and more and more dependent on trade with her colonies. Exports to North America rose from a yearly average of £524,000 in the late 1720s to just over £1 million twenty years later. During the same period the annual total of exports to the West Indies increased from £473,000 to £732,000 and to India from £112,000 to £522,000.

And yet as exports to the colonies spiralled, Britain’s economic future remained uncertain. The chief threat came from France and was most menacing in India and North America where fighting had hitherto been limited and inconclusive. The danger was greatest in North America where, by 1754, violent clashes had increased as the advance guards of British and French settlers collided in the Ohio valley. The French and their Indian allies had been penetrating the Ohio River for some years, moving southwards from Quebec. Far to the south, parties of Frenchmen were simultaneously edging north from their coastal settlements on the Gulf of Mexico along the Mississippi River. If uninterrupted, France would, in the near future, establish a title to the entire region around the Mississippi and its tributaries and so occupy a broad swathe of territory from New Orleans in the south to Quebec in the north, blocking the westwards expansion of Britain’s colonies.