The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (26 page)

This, unlike previous Franco-British wars, was a contest of ideologies. The French, at least during the 1790s, were animated by an urge to emancipate the people of Europe, and share with them the blessings of the new Revolutionary order based on equal rights for all men and government by the general will. The ideals of the Revolution appealed to many in Britain, particularly those excluded from power, who saw them as the blueprint for a new political order in their own country. Jacobin theories of equality also won converts, but they and more moderate apostles of the Revolution were soon driven underground. In 1794–5, the government, desperate to secure national unity and fearing the existence of what later would be called a fifth column, began the legal persecution of anyone suspected of Revolutionary sympathies. Their numbers and powers of persuasion were exaggerated, but nevertheless they became, like their French counterparts, bogey men intoxicated by wild fancies:

I am a hearty Jacobin,

Who owns no God, and dreads no Sin,

Ready to dash through thick and thin for Freedom:

Our boasted Laws I hate and curse,

Bad from the first, by age grown worse,

I pant and sigh for Universeal Suffrage.
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And yet, in the political climate of the late 1790s, such a figure had a potential for mischief-making. War-weariness, food and anti-militia riots, the naval mutinies of 1797 and their successors, and the 1798 insurrection in Ireland were reminders that, at times, British political unity was brittle.

Political propaganda which emphasised national solidarity was vital in what quickly became a total war in a modern sense. Sustained and effective resistance to France required the greatest ever mobilisation of Britain’s manpower and financial resources. Just over a tenth of Britain’s adult males were drafted into the armed services during the war, and even then there were continual complaints from commanders of shortages of men. By 1810 there were 145,000 sailors and 31,000 marines, 300,000 regular soldiers and militiamen and 189,000 volunteers, an early version of the Home Guard.

The total cost of the war was just over £1000 million of which £830 million was consumed by the army and navy. Part of this sum came from increased customs and excise duties, which was why it was so important to maintain the flow of British trade, and from new imposts, including income tax which was first introduced in 1798 and had yielded £142 million by the end of the war.
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Government borrowing spiralled, and by 1815 the national debt stood at £834 million. It was not surprising that the rich were willing to invest so much of their money in government stock for it was, in a way, an insurance against imported, levelling Jacobinism.

Britain clearly possessed the capacity to wage total war and at every stage outmatched her antagonist when it came to raising cash. This meant that when the going got bad, as it did in 1797 and again after 1806, Britain could continue fighting, even without allies. This ability to hang on counted for a lot, since the Franco-British conflict was essentially a war of attrition. Wearing down France, through weakening its economy, had been central to British strategy since the outbreak of the war. Remembering the triumphs of 1759–63, the government in 1793 looked to the sea as the means of bringing about the breakdown of France and, incidentally, the strengthening of Britain. The process was explained to the Commons in March 1801 by Henry Dundas, the Secretary of State for War, who had been one of its stoutest advocates:

… the primary object of our attention ought to be, by what means we can most effectively increase those resources upon which depend our naval superiority, and at the same time diminish or appropriate to ourselves those which might otherwise enable the enemy to contend with us in this respect.

It was, he continued, therefore imperative to ‘cut off the commercial resources of our enemy, as by doing so we infallibly weaken and destroy their naval resources.’
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Dundas’s war was an imperial contest, waged in the manner of the elder Pitt, in which Britain picked off her opponent’s colonies and swept her merchantmen from the seas at the same time as preserving, even enlarging, her own commerce. Some of the loot would be kept and the rest bartered for a European settlement designed to restrain France. As in 1763, Britain would emerge richer and stronger than ever, or, in the words of a pro-government versifier of 1798:

Matchless Heroes still we own;

Crown’d with honourable spoils

From the leagued Nations won

On their high prows they proudly stand

The God-like Guardians of their native Land

Lords of the mighty Deep triumphant ride,

Wealth and Victory at their side.
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The results of the naval war were up to expectations. In 1793 the French fleet was bottled up in its harbours, and a blockade imposed on its Atlantic and Mediterranean seaboards. There followed a series of seaborne offensives against the French West Indian colonies and, after 1795, when Holland surrendered, the Dutch. As supporters of these operations predicted, they were highly profitable; the prize money from Demerara and Essequibo (now part of Guyana) was £200,000 and the invasion forces were followed by British planters keen to buy up sugar estates at knockdown prices.
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The cost in lives was enormous with a death rate of 70 per cent among sailors and soldiers, nearly all of them victims of malaria and yellow fever exacerbated by alcoholism.
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As the wastage rate among fighting men rose, local commanders decided to recruit free negroes, despite the protests of planters horrified by the idea of any black men trained in arms. In 1798 a new expedient was tried to increase the numbers of the West India Regiment and the army began buying slaves to fill its ranks; within nine years just over 6,800 had been purchased at a cost to the Treasury of £484,000.
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The fruits of this campaign fought by slave-soldiers and fever-ridden redcoats were listed by Dundas in 1801. In eight years, Britain had acquired Tobago, Martinique, Guadeloupe, St Lucia and the Saintes from the French, Curaçao, Demerara and Essequibo from Holland, and Trinidad from Spain, which had entered into an alliance with France in 1795. Further overseas gains were Malta, Minorca, and the Dutch colonies in the East Indies, Trincomalee on the coast of Ceylon (Sri-Lanka) and Cape Town. It was, by the standards of any previous war, an impressive haul and deeply satisfying to the commercial community who welcomed new markets.

These were desperately needed in 1801. On the Continent the war had gone the French way, despite early prophecies that the makeshift Revolutionary armies would quickly fall apart when they encountered regular troops. The reverse had happened, with Austrian, Prussian and Russian armies coming off worse in nearly every engagement. What was more, the French had discovered how to compensate for their financial weakness by making war pay for itself; as they fanned out into the Low Countries, the Rhineland, Switzerland and northern Italy, French armies lived off the land, and topped up their war-chests with forced contributions from the people they had liberated. At the same time French soldiers, learning as they fought, developed a tough professionalism and the Revolutionary principle of making talent the sole criterion for promotion encouraged the emergence of a cadre of highly able and intelligent commanders.

Britain’s contribution to the land war in Europe had been negligible. Following earlier precedents, the younger Pitt had despatched expeditionary forces to the Low Countries but, undermanned and mismanaged, they were quickly sent packing. Another old expedient had to be reluctantly revived in 1794–5, when Pitt was forced to offer subsidies and loans to Austria and Prussia for whom the financial strain of the war had been too great. British credit kept Austrian, Prussian and, in 1799, Russian armies in the fight, but it did not improve their performance on the battlefield. France’s armies remained unbeatable, and by 1801 it had absorbed the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium) and the Rhineland and established satellite republics in Holland, Switzerland and northern Italy.

The fortunes of the land war in western Europe affected the naval balance of power in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. In 1793 this had strongly favoured the Royal Navy, which mustered 115 line-of-battle ships against France’s 76. The conquest of the Netherlands in 1795 added 59 battleships to the French total, and the Spanish alliance a further 76. The risk of an overwhelming Franco-Dutch-Spanish concentration in home waters was so great that, early in 1797, the Mediterranean fleet withdrew to deploy off Spain’s Atlantic coastline. The alarm proved premature; in February 1797 Admiral Sir John Jervis led his heavily outnumbered fleet in an attack on the Spanish off Cape St Vincent and took four battleships, and in October, Admiral Lord Duncan severely mauled the Dutch at Camperdown.

The pressure was off for the time being, although the nerves of the Admiralty and fleet commanders had been severely jolted by the waves of disaffection that had run through the Channel and Mediterranean fleets during the early summer. There were further mutinies, mostly by pressed Irish sailors infected with the nationalist virus, and a spate of unrest on foreign stations which lasted well into 1798. The hidden hand of Jacobin agitators was feared and some were uncovered, but for the greater part the sailors’ grievances were limited to their working conditions, wages and treatment, matters on which the government was willing to offer concessions.

The victories of 1797 confirmed British paramountcy in the Channel and Atlantic, but the French held the initiative in the Mediterranean. By the beginning of 1798, the Toulon fleet had been refurbished and transports were assembling in the harbour to take on board a 17,000-strong army, commanded by Napoleon. Its purpose was to strike a knock-out blow against Britain, but a question mark hung over its destination. There were two alternatives; an invasion of Ireland, where the French landfall would be a signal for a mass uprising by the Gaelic, Catholic Irish, or Egypt. Egypt was chosen on strategic grounds since its occupation would jeopardise Britain’s considerable commercial interests in the Middle East, and place a French army within striking distance of India.

The sheer boldness of Napoleon’s plan still astonishes. Yet it was taken seriously by Dundas, whose specialist advisers agreed that an attack on India, either overland across Syria and Iraq or through the Red Sea, was perfectly feasible, and that Napoleon might expect assistance from the Shah of Persia (Iran) and the Amir of Afghanistan. Moreover, it was imagined that even a small force of European troops could easily tilt the Indian balance of power against Britain. All this was a nasty shock for the cabinet, and Dundas, who was certain that the loss of India would prove ‘fatal’ to Britain, ordered reinforcements to be rushed there.

They were not needed. Napoleon’s master-stroke was frustrated when his fleet and transports were destroyed by Admiral Sir Horatio, later Lord, Nelson at Abukir Bay in August. The French army, abandoned by its General who hurried back to Paris to further his political career, was left isolated in Egypt. It was finally evicted by a British expeditionary force sent for the purpose in 1801. In India the Marquess Wellesley moved quickly to eliminate France’s potential ally, Tipu Sultan, and prepared to do likewise to the Mahrathas who employed French mercenaries.

The episode had been nerve-wracking for British ministers, who had been given an object lesson in the vulnerability of India and its communications. Even if Napoleon had simply stayed put in Egypt, he would have severed the so-called ‘overland route’ to India. This stretched from Port Said across the Suez isthmus to Alexandria and provided the fastest means of communication between Britain and India. It was clear from the events of 1798 that the future security of India required British control of the Mediterranean and political domination of the Ottoman empire, whose territories now became a vast
glacis
defending India’s western frontiers. Furthermore, the possibility that the rulers of Persia and Afghanistan might have connived with Napoleon made it imperative that both countries were drawn into Britain’s orbit. Napoleon’s Egyptian adventure had laid the foundations of British policy in the Mediterranean and Middle East for the next hundred and fifty years. It had also opened up a new region for Franco-British imperial rivalry which gathered pace after 1815.

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For the moment, France’s war aims were confined to Europe. Here there had been a brief peace, signed at Amiens in the spring of 1802, which was no more than a breathing space during which Britain and France bickered and recovered their strength. When the war reopened just over a year later, Napoleon set his mind on the conquest of Britain, which he recognised as his most formidable and implacable enemy. His invasion plans demanded mastery of the Channel by the Franco-Spanish fleet based at Toulon. This broke through the blockade in May 1805, made a feint towards the West Indies, but was intercepted by Nelson off Cape Trafalgar in October and destroyed. Eighteen battleships were taken or sunk and with them went all hopes of France ever again challenging Britain at sea. Stringent measures were taken to hinder the rebuilding of the French navy, including a preemptive attack on Copenhagen and the seizure of the Danish fleet in 1807. Fears of an invasion receded, France’s overseas trade was choked and Britain was free to continue engorging itself on her enemies’ colonies, including some which had been returned at Amiens.

On land, Napoleon was triumphant. His Grande Armée, originally earmarked for the invasion of Britain, turned against her allies, Austria, Prussia and Russia. Between 1805 and 1807 he chalked up an amazing sequence of victories: Ulm, Austerlitz, Jena-Auerstädt, Eylau and Friedland. As a result, Austria, Prussia and Russia were impelled, literally at gunpoint, to accept a new European order devised by Napoleon. The Continent was now dominated by an enlarged France and its satellites, the Kingdoms of Italy and Westphalia, the Confederation of the Rhine and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Whether or not directly under Napoleon’s heel, all the states of Europe were forced to adopt his 1806 Berlin Decrees which forbade all commerce with Britain.