The War of Wars (33 page)

A fleet of sixteen ships of the line and twenty frigates and lesser ships was assembled to convey transports carrying 18,000 troops. The fleet was delayed waiting for the Spanish fleet to accompany it, and put to sea without the latter on 15 December 1796, from Brest on its way to Bantry Bay. At first, Hoche’s expedition was favoured by luck. Two British squadrons had been assigned to intercept it. One, under Admiral Colpoys off Brest, had been blown fifty miles to the west by gales and entirely missed the French fleet’s departure, eventually returning to Spithead. Another, under Lord Bridport, failed to leave Spithead at all for a fortnight.

Not a single French ship was to be captured by the British during the whole expedition – although the redoubtable Pellew, in the
Indefatigable
, managed alone to instil panic in the fleet as it negotiated a treacherous channel, the Raz de Sein, driving a huge 74-gun battleship on to a reef and causing the French fleet to divide into two separate flotillas. When the two rejoined, to Wolfe Tone’s dismay, the ship carrying Hoche and the French Admiral Morard de Galles was missing. ‘I believe,’ wrote Tone, in a wrath too deep even for expletives, ‘it was the first instance of an admiral in a clean frigate, with moderate weather and moonlit nights, parting company with his fleet.’

On 22 December the reunited fleet of thirty-seven ships – still without Hoche and Morard de Galles – was some twelve miles off Bantry Bay, but the wind proved too much in the narrow strait leading to the bay. Tone remarked angrily: ‘I believe that we have made 300 tacks, and have not gained 100 yards in a straight line.’ Just twelve ships actually reached the bay, while twenty-five others were blown away out of sight. The weather worsened further, and five days later only six battleships with four transports carrying 4,000 men remained under General Grouchy, Hoche’s second-in-command. He decided against landing and sailed for Brest, arriving on 12 January, long after the rest of the fleet and a day before Hoche and Morard de Galles in the frigate
Fraternité
.

Four French ships had been wrecked and seven stragglers captured by the British during this sorry expedition which had ended without
any landing at all. Hoche’s reputation was besmirched and from then on the French were to be much more careful about further Irish expeditions, although they did try, on a smaller scale, which itself was counter-productive.

The Directory now decided to try to sow terror along the English mainland itself. A pirate expedition was organized under an American officer, a Colonel Tate, consisting of 1,800 men recruited from prisons and among the vagabonds and beggars of France. They were dressed in black uniforms and dubbed the Black Legion. Their destination was Bristol, Britain’s great port in the west of England, which was to be looted and burnt to the ground. The expedition, on which Tate was accompanied by his mistress, set sail in February 1797 escorted by two French frigates, a corvette and a lugger. They arrived at Ilfracombe in north Devon and landed a couple of boats ashore, breaking into several houses and carrying away valuables before scuttling some of the fishing boats in the harbour. Many went barefoot or wore wooden clogs, and most got drunk on local beer and refused to obey orders. Hearing of the approach of a regiment of angry local volunteers, the little liberating force departed.

They sailed to the coast of Pembrokeshire, where once again they engaged in plundering and burning buildings. At the approach of the militia and Welsh volunteers they withdrew. Seeing a group of Welsh women spectators in their colourful red shawls, they are said to have mistaken them for a force of British regular troops, whereupon they surrendered. Tate’s mistress beat him about the head in fury. The few ships that had brought them were taken by British vessels without a fight. The experience of these two disastrous expeditions convinced the French to lay off invading the British Isles for a while.

Early in 1798, Ulster erupted in an orgy of violence. The uprising, consisting of discontented but also warring Protestants and Catholics alike, calling themselves ‘citizens’ and supporting a French-style Directory, sought self-rule from the British. People were burnt alive and lynched, houses razed. As the rebellion threatened to spread, the British forces swelled to some 60,000 men under the able and immensely
experienced veteran of the American wars, General Cornwallis. In May insurrections also broke out in the counties of Dublin, Meath and Kildare. The French insisted that the time was ripe to hasten to the aid of the Irish. Tone believed his moment had at last arrived.

Even so, after their earlier experience, the French despatched only a small force, Tone arguing that it was but necessary for the French to land for the population to rise in revolt against the English. A force of 1,200 infantry and four cannon set sail accompanied by three 40-gun frigates in August. Humbert, their commander, was a tough and experienced soldier and his men were veterans from Italy and the Rhine. They reached Killala Bay in calm waters on 22 August and went ashore that evening unopposed. Humbert displayed considerable skill and determination. He defeated a small company of volunteers and occupied Killala. There at last local people began to join him. Advancing on Castlebar, some twenty miles to the south, these French professionals encountered a much larger force of militia and routed them, capturing 14 guns and taking 3,000 prisoners: about 100 British soldiers were killed.

However, four columns of British regular troops, some 4,000 men, were now on the way and Humbert soon found himself being pursued. He eluded his hunters for ten days before being surrounded at Ballinamuck, where he surrendered. Two factors had caused Humbert’s debacle: the Irish had failed to rally to him in anything like sufficient quantities, and those that had rallied were untrained and without arms; and the British had responded with the customary overwhelming force that they had used against Irish insurgents in the past.

On 16 September 1798 the French mounted a further attack from Brest, with the 74-gun
Hoche
, accompanied by eight 40-gun frigates and an invasion force of 3,000 with a huge amount of stores and considerable artillery, destined this time for Lough Swilly. Tone, under the alias of Smith, went along for a second time. The leader of the expedition was the experienced Commodore Bompart. Reaching Tory Island on the Irish coast on 11 October, the invading force was for once detected by British ships – a flotilla under Sir John Warren
of three 74-gun ships and five frigates. The French made a run for it, and the British gave chase into a furious storm which dismasted the French flagship and so battered one of the frigates that it began to sink. One of the pursuing British ships, the
Anson
, was also dismasted.

Ruthlessly Bompart ordered the stricken French ship to wreck itself upon the shore, sending up rockets to distract the British and lure them to their doom on the rocks. The crippled ship disobeyed and by dawn the British flagships had caught up with the ailing
Hoche
. The furious firefight that ensued lasted three hours, leaving half of
Hoche
’s crew dead and most of its guns destroyed. Bompart struck his colours, as did three of the French frigates. A further three were captured two days later and only two made it back to port. It was a calamitous defeat for an expedition that had not even been able to land. Wolfe Tone himself was captured and later committed suicide in prison, knowing that his fate otherwise would be the gallows.

There were two other minor expeditions. Another Irish freedom fighter, Napper Tandy, had set sail for Donegal on 5 September in a French brig accompanied by forty-five French soldiers and a huge volume of leaflets calling upon 30,000 men to rise up when he landed. They reached Rutland Island off Donegal ten days later and landed. But they soon heard of Humbert’s defeat and hastily re-embarked, returning unscathed a week later. On 26 October a relief expedition for Humbert arrived at last and, also learning of his failure, sailed back to Brest. They were spotted by British ships and pursued, but escaped by ditching most of their guns and equipment.

Of the three major expeditions, involving some 9,000 troops altogether, one had been beaten by the weather, another defeated on land, and another routed at sea. The promised Irish uprising had not materialized, largely because the population was too cowed, the French had arrived in too small numbers and the British were present in unexpected strength. The French had grossly underestimated the size of the task: had a much bigger army landed, the Irish might have risen up, believing they would not be left to their fate against British retribution. It was a case of too little, too late. Moreover, the French never had command of the sea and only luck had allowed five
expeditions to reach Ireland unintercepted. Even a huge expedition would have faced the hazard of Atlantic gales.

Pitt believed the immediate danger was past, but that it was essential to follow up such an event by immediate steps for a union: only by guaranteeing the Irish the same government, franchise and trading privileges as England possessed would that country be freed from French subversion. It was a noble ideal, but it required full Catholic emancipation – and the King was dead set against it. Ironically, this was the issue that was to bring Pitt’s ministry to an end and topple France’s greatest enemy from power.

At the beginning of 1797, the French revolutionary leaders of the Directory were formulating a far more ambitious plan for striking at England than the flanking attack through Ireland. With both the powerful Dutch and Spanish fleets now on their side, they resolved to make a rendezvous of all three fleets to create a grand armada to sweep British seapower from the Channel, inflict a crippling blow at British trade and permit an invasion force to cross. With overwhelming naval power this should not have proved too difficult. All that the three fleets had to do was to evade the British blockade, and avoid an engagement before they met up.

Britain’s predicament was therefore truly appalling. Napoleon was on his final mopping-up operation in Italy and about to inflict the blow that would knock Austria out of the war. That would leave Britain with just one ally on the entire European continent – small, loyal Portugal, which was militarily insignificant. At sea Britain had held her own, but had won no decisive triumph. The Glorious First of June had proved a huge boost to morale and badly damaged the French fleet, but that was soon repaired. The frigate captains were performing daring raids and keeping the shipping lanes open, but that was all. Meanwhile the British had been all but expelled from the Mediterranean with the fall of Corsica: only the troops that had been taken from the island to Elba remained, along with the outposts of Malta, Minorca and Gibraltar.

The fate of the British was now to rest decisively in the hands of two very different men. The first was a small man with an elfin, sardonic,
bitter expression, a cunning squashed rodent face at once harsh, determined and slightly humorous: Sir John Jervis, ‘Black jack’, was one of the most detested commanders in the navy, known equally for his unbending love of discipline as for his tongue-lashing of subordinates. He seemed to possess a cruel, even sadistic streak: he would make junior officers bow low before him – ‘lower, sir, lower’ – for his own amusement. He resorted frequently to the lash and the death sentence. Yet he was an excellent naval strategist – the originator of the ‘close blockade’, and was enormously tough and determined, inspiring respect as well as dislike in his men. He cared nothing for the opinion of others. He was personally incorruptible, in a service full of malpractices, and his determination to stamp them out was later to prove his undoing. At that moment he was commanding the British fleet off Spain’s western coast, bottling up the Spanish fleet at Cadiz.

The second man, utterly unlike this stern, acerbic old sea salt, was at the same time given a dangerous duty to perform within the Mediterranean: to evacuate the British troops on Elba with just two frigates, the
Minerve
and the
Blanche
. His name was Horatio Nelson. As he set off on 19 December 1796, he ran into Spanish frigates at nearly midnight. He called out, ‘This is an English frigate’, and told the captain of one to surrender. A voice shouted back with a Scottish accent, ‘This is a Spanish frigate, and you may begin as soon as you please.’ The captain was a descendant of the Stuart dynasty. A furious gunbattle ensued. Nelson three times offered a ceasefire in exchange for surrender, and received the answer, ‘Not while I can fire a gun.’ After some ninety minutes the two Spanish ships struck their colours, but by then another Spanish frigate had heard the noise of the cannon and was upon Nelson. He had to cast off his prize and engage this, until with dawn he saw two huge Spanish battleships approaching. Heavily outgunned, he had no choice but to run before them for a whole day.

On eventually reaching Elba, he performed his task of taking off the island garrison, and then returned to Gibraltar on 9 January, where he learned that the Spanish fleet had slipped the blockade and was heading out into the Atlantic. He set off to join the main fleet on 11 January, but was soon pursued by two Spanish ships of the line.

At that moment one of the
Minerve
’s sailors fell overboard, and a boat
commanded by Lieutenant Hardy was lowered to go to the rescue. The boat was quickly swept away by the tide, and Nelson had to decide whether to go to their rescue and risk coming within range of the huge ships chasing him or abandon the boat. He decided to pick up his men. The Spanish ships, seeing to their amazement the British ship backtracking (‘backing its mizzen topsail’ in the jargon) was confused, wondering whether a trap was being sprung with some as yet unseen British ships lurking over the horizon: why else would a tiny ship sail directly towards two huge ones? In turn they took in their sails and held back, while the
Minerve
, having picked up the little boat, returned to its former course.

Then the chase was on again. When night fell, Nelson ordered all the lights to be hidden and changed course suddenly: he thus threw off his pursuers. He was congratulating himself on the coup as the ship rolled in a gentle swell beneath the stars. Then it became apparent that the stars were rather too low – in fact on almost every side: he was in the middle of the thirty-ship Spanish fleet. He was astonished to observe it sailing south and decided it was heading for the West Indies; so he tagged along during the night to sense its direction, taking the colossal risk of detection and annihilation or capture.