The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (27 page)

Britain answered with an embargo of its own, enforced by the Royal Navy, which brought Europe’s overseas trade to a virtual standstill. Europeans were denied such products as tobacco and sugar, which had been re-exported by Britain, and British manufactured goods such as cotton. France could not make up the shortfall since her industry lacked the capacity to satisfy Europe’s markets, and her import trade had been all but extinguished by the blockade. While Europe’s trade stagnated, Britain’s actually expanded as merchants penetrated new markets in the United States (until the war of 1812), Asia, the Middle East and, despite resistance, Spanish South America. Fresh outlets for British goods obviously offset the loss of older markets, but they did not entirely replace them. By the winter of 1811–12 a recession seemed likely as exports were in the doldrums and manufacturing output was falling.

The search for new commercial advantage was carried on with great vigour. After the reoccupation of Cape Town in 1806, the local commander, Admiral Sir Home Popham, off his own bat delivered a
coup de main
against Buenos Aires in May of that year. News of his exploit aroused enormous excitement in London, where senior army and naval officers combined with business interests to promote a profitable war of conquest against the whole of Spanish America. Dreams of a new American empire with vast markets proved illusory; nerveless command and mismanagement led to an ignominious evacuation of the River Plate by midsummer 1807.

By this time events in Europe were taking a new turn. Napoleon’s attempts to browbeat Portugal and set his featherbrained brother, Joseph, on the throne of Spain dragged him into an unfamiliar type of war. The Spanish insurrection of May 1808 was a spontaneous, popular uprising, which took the French by surprise, and forced their generals to fight a guerrilla war in a countryside where food and fodder was scarce. The Portuguese and Spanish appealed to Britain, and the government immediately pledged cash, arms and an army. Pitt had been dead for two years, but his ideas still formed the framework of British policy, which was to offer unqualified help to anyone who promised to fight France.

The resulting Anglo-Spanish-Portuguese alliance was one of convenience rather than conviction. Portugal was transformed into a British dependency for the next six years, and the Spanish, suspecting that Britain coveted their American possessions and commerce, steadfastly resisted demands to open their markets to British merchants. Old hatreds died hard; in 1814 British merchants in Buenos Aires complained that local officials were ‘arbitrary, insulting and vexatious’, and that they suffered the ‘bigotted Zeal and vindictive rage of the soldiery’, and in the same year a British sloop was fired on by the guns of the fort at Cartagena.
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Nevertheless the alliance held, thanks to the tact and firmness of the British commander-in-chief, Arthur Wellesley. He was a consummate strategist who saw from the first that he was about to conduct a war of attrition in which the winning army would be that which was well-fed and supplied. The navy escorted convoys of merchantmen to Lisbon, where cargoes of grain and fodder were unloaded for distribution up country. There were many nail-biting moments, but on the whole Wellesley’s troops did not starve. The French, living off the land, did.

Moreover, Wellesley repeatedly beat French armies. His string of victories between 1808 and 1812 made the Iberian peninsula the graveyard of French marshals’ reputations, and dispelled for ever the myth of French invincibility. Disengagement from an unwinnable war was unthinkable for Napoleon, since it would be a confession of weakness which was bound to encourage resistance elsewhere. He was politically bankrupt, with nothing to offer Europe but economic stagnation, heavy taxes and conscription, the last two necessary to preserve the war machine with which he menaced anyone who opposed his will. His confidence, one could almost say hubris, remained high, and at the beginning of 1812 he was preparing to solve his problems in the only way he knew how, by war. He intended to overawe Russia, which was showing disconcerting signs of independence, and then, in person, take charge of affairs in Spain.

The invasion of Russia, designed as an exercise in intimidation, went awry. French muddle, miscalculation and over-confidence combined with Russian doggedness to cause first the disintegration, and then the destruction of the Grande Armée during the autumn and winter of 1812–13. Prussia broke ranks and joined Russia, and so too did Austria after a little hesitation. Britain was swift to rebuild a new coalition delivering its members just over £26 million in subsidies and loan guarantees as well as cannon and muskets from her foundries and workshops.

Napoleon’s European
imperium
fell apart quickly. Founded on victories, it could not survive the defeats inflicted on its master’s armies in the autumn and winter of 1813–14. Joseph Bonaparte was finally turned out of Spain, and in January 1814 Wellesley, now Duke of Wellington, led an Anglo-Portuguese army into southern France. Squeezed between Wellington and the Austrians, Prussians and Russians who were striking deep into eastern France, Napoleon abdicated in April. A year later he returned from Elba, convinced that he could again mesmerise his countrymen with fresh dreams of martial glory. The end came at Waterloo where he suffered a decisive defeat at the hands of Wellington and Blücher’s Prussians. At the end of June, Napoleon surrendered to the British, and was sent in exile to their remotest colony, St Helena where, unchastened, he brooded on his mistakes.

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Winning the war against France had been a Herculean effort. The conventional wisdom, then and later, attributed final victory to seapower because, above all, it ensured that Britain stayed in the ring. The ships of the Royal Navy had prevented invasion; they had confined French power to Europe and allowed Britain to occupy nearly all the overseas possessions of her adversaries; they had guarded the convoys which sustained Wellington’s army in the peninsula; and they had guaranteed the survival of Britain’s global commerce, which generated the wealth needed to pay for her war effort, and underwrite those of the three big European powers with armies large enough to engage Napoleon on equal terms.

There were many reasons for the navy’s success. The determination, self- confidence and professionalism of its officers and crews owed much to traditions established in the previous hundred years. Nelson was outstanding as a leader and tactician, but Duncan, Jervis and Collingwood also deserve high praise. All understood their country’s predicament and how much depended on them, which was why, whenever the chance came for battle, they grabbed at it, regardless of the odds. In the decisive battles of Cape St Vincent, Camperdown, Abukir Bay and Trafalgar the British fleets were outnumbered but, trusting to superior seamanship and gunnery, their admirals took the offensive. An aggressive, gambling spirit paid off. As Nelson famously observed, an officer who laid his ship alongside the enemy could never be in the wrong.

Much depended on the individual naval officer’s instinctively correct response to an emergency, something which Nelson cultivated among his subordinates to the point where they knew without being told what he expected of them. This quality filtered downwards. During an engagement with the French frigate
Topaze
off Guadeloupe in January 1809, Captain William Maude of
the Jason
saw no need to inform the commander of his consort, the
Cleopatra,
of his intentions. ‘I considered it unnecessary to make any signals to him, and he most fully anticipated my wishes by bringing his ship to anchor on the frigate’s starboard bow and opening a heavy fire,’ Maude wrote afterwards.
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The action lasted forty minutes and was decided by superior broadsides aimed against the French ship’s hull.

Adroitness and accuracy in manning of guns and agility in reefing or unfurling sails, so vital for quick manoeuvres, required careful and intense training of crews, nearly all of whom were pressed or conscripted landsmen. Many, perhaps the majority of officers ruled their ships as the squire did his village, with a strong but fatherly hand. This pattern of leadership, which reflected the values of the ruling class and the hierarchy of contemporary civilian life, also extended to the army where it was encouraged by Wellington who insisted that a gentleman’s sense of personal honour included an active concern for the welfare of those beneath him. In 1783, a naval officer reprimanded for spending money to provide treatment for his sick, responded with a classic statement of service paternalism:

As a British officer I always consider myself accountable to my King and Country for the lives of the Seamen under my command and more particularly in the present instance, as they are returning to their Native Country after having endured great hardships and fatigues in His Majesty’s Service, and had so gallantly distinguished themselves in several actions in India.
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Not all officers shared such sentiments, especially during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. The desperate need to transform civilians into skilled seamen as quickly as possible, and fears that some might be infected with Jacobin opinions, led many officers to rely on intimidation as the sole means of preserving discipline. According to the crew of HMS
Magnificent,
Lieutenant Marshall was one of this kind.

His tyranny is not bearable, we are able and willing to loose the last drop of Blood in Defence of our Gracious King and country, but to fight under him will hurt us very much, for the least fault he makes the Boatswain’s mates thrash us most unmerciful … He threatens to make us all jump over board. Indeed part of his threats is already taking place as two unfortunate fellows in attempting to swim on shore is drowned.
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Abuse of this kind was made worse by the fact that ships remained at sea for longer periods than before. The hulls of copper-bottomed men-o’-war did not need regular scraping in dockyards, and the squadrons in distant waters were now provided with bases with repair facilities and stores. Wartime commitments had created additional naval establishments at Malta, Alexandria, Bermuda, Barbados, Martinique, Rio de Janeiro, Mauritius, Cape Town, Madras, Bombay and Penang. Intelligence services had also expanded with the enlistment in 1793 of the world-wide network of Lloyds shipping insurance agents. They provided much that was useful; in November 1813, Brown Lindsay, Lloyds’s agents in Pernambuco, informed London of the movements of three American privateers which were preparing to intercept homebound East Indiamen off Brazil.
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The war which had enhanced the reputation of the navy also rescued that of the army which had been blemished by its performance in the American War, and the series of catastrophic forays into northern Europe between 1794 and 1809. Credit for the army’s rehabilitation deservedly went to Wellington and those hand-picked senior officers who ran the peninsular campaigns. As he freely admitted, his achievements in Europe owed everything to lessons he had learned in India. He had shown that imperial soldiering, hitherto a despised and arcane branch of warfare, was an ideal apprenticeship for ambitious officers.

The deeds of soldiers and sailors were widely celebrated in Britain. Church bells were rung and services of thanksgiving held as news of a victory spread across the country, and the print shops were quickly filled with portraits of admirals and generals or representations of battles on land and sea. No previous war had excited such enormous public interest and generated so much patriotic enthusiasm, or, on occasions, anxiety. On hearing the news of Waterloo, the Countess of Jersey exclaimed, ‘
For glory
we had enough before, and this battle only confirms what one always felt – the English are the best soldiers in the world.’
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Self-assuredness of this kind had been commonplace throughout the eighteenth century, and had grown stronger after the victories of 1759–62. Britain ‘is the best in the world’ a Yorkshireman assured a French émigré in 1794. He and his fellow refugees had been greeted in London by shouts of ‘God damn the French dogs’ from some bargemen, who then showered them with lumps of charcoal. It was equally bad in Edinburgh, where the visitor was stared at by a girl, who then remarked, ‘Mother, he is certainly not French for he is fat and not black.’
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At the outbreak of war British arrogance and xenophobia were as strong as ever.

Hostility and contempt towards a traditional foe were not enough to bind the nation together in a long-drawn-out war against France. A more positive patriotism was needed by Pitt’s government, fearful of the persuasiveness of Revolutionary political propaganda, which naturally concentrated on the inequalities in British society. Moreover, popular patriotism in the early 1790s laid great stress on individual freedom and the merits of the constitution so that reformers could and did claim to be true patriots. A subtle but important change was needed to the nature of British patriotism. National unity, prosperity, opportunities for self-advancement, social harmony and the charity shown by the rich to the poor were emphasised as vital sources of national pride. Most important of all was loyalty to the crown; George III was the keystone of the state and the guarantor of its tranquillity. France had killed its king and thereby had thrown itself into chaos.

This vision of British nationhood was universally promoted by the government, ministers of the Churches of England and Scotland, mainstream Methodists and private associations, of patriots.
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Always the appeal was to bonds of allegiance and unity:

Thus Britons guard their ancient Fame,

Assert their Empire o’er the sea,

And to the envying world proclaim

ONE NATION still is Brave and Free –

Resolv’d to conquer or to die

True to their King, their LAWS, their LIBERTY:

Un-ransom’d
ENGLAND spurns all Foreign Sway.
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