Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (16 page)

Volunteer officers were warned to carry their field-equipment and sleep and mess on exactly the same terms as their men, and detailed instructions were issued for opposing the enemy's landing. Instead of wasting their fire like the French on the Aboukir beaches, Volunteers were to wait. till the invaders sprang ashore from crowded boats and then shatter them with a well-directed volley, following up with the bayonet before they could recover. " Steadily obeying orders, restraining their impetuosity and fighting with the cool, determined courage of their native minds, instead of imitating the intoxicated and blind fury of their
enemy," ran the Orders of the 1
st Royal Edinburghs, " this regiment may hope to render essential service."

By October 7th Farington thought invasion would come within a fortnight: "God grant us a good delivery!" wrote Windham to Cobbett. The Prime Minister was almost beside himself with anxiety for the Prince of Wales who, nettled by his father's refusal to entrust him with a command, insisted on going down to Brighton to lead the local Volunteers. Pitt at Walmer, enduring the fatigue of a drill sergeant at successive parades often fifteen or twenty miles distant from each other, was even more exposed, being "in the most dangerous place in the whole kingdom." The attack, he believed, would come immediately after the 20th; his niece, Hester Stanhope, now keeping house for him, expected it every night. Even far inland men felt themselves threatened; the Marquis of Buckingham at Stowe thought that the Dutch contingent, landing at Lynn and Wisbech, would cover the thirty miles to Peterborough in a day and arm the French prisoners at Norman Cross. It was generally supposed that the gentry were to be murdered by specially picked ruffians; such tales, wrote Lord Cornwallis, were enough to frighten a poor countryman out of his wits. At Silson, in the heart of

¹
Bannister, II,
110.

Whittlebury Forest—as far from the sea as any place in England— the villagers decided to march as a body with their household belongings to Penzance, the most distant spot they could imagine, with the parish clerk, a carpenter by trade, going before with axe and handsaw to clear a way through the unknown.
¹

But though even Collingwood with the Fleet off Brest supposed that Bonaparte would make the attempt and hoped that it would not be taken too lightly, day succeeded day and nothing happened. Down at Aldeburgh the alarm signals were fired and Crabbe's son rushed into his room crying "The French are landing and the drums are beating to arms!" and the old poet, like a true Englishman, replied, " Well, you and I can do no good or we should be among them—we must wait the event," and composed himself again to sleep. But when he awoke the wonted scene on the beach was unchanged and there was no sign of any invader. The glorious weather of the summer lingered on through October, and at Eden Farm Lord Auckland's carnations were still in full bloom with ripe grapes and Morello cherries on the walls in early November. And the east wind continued to blow in the invaders' favour. But still they did not come.

The First Consul had uttered his threats so loudly that, when as autumn wore on he failed to live up to them, Englishmen began to doubt whether he meant to come at all. "What! he begins to find excuses," wrote Nelson from the Mediterranean; "I thought he would invade England in the face of the sun! Now he wants a three days' fog that never yet happened." On November 2nd Auckland told Secretary Beresford that though French menaces were louder and more violent than ever, he was growing incredulous. "If the arch-villain really meant to make the attempt, he would announce it in every newspaper in Europe that he had desisted from all thought of it." Others credited reports of republican unrest; in early December it was said that a demi-brigade at Boulogne had mutinied on receiving orders to embark.
²
The cartoonists grew jubilant; London ballad-sellers did a roaring trade with a broadsheet entitled
The Bellman and Little Boney.

"This little Boney says he'll come

At merry Christmas time,

But that I say is all a hum

Or I no more will rhyme.

¹
Old Oak,
47;
Farington, II,
62, 160;
Windham Papers,
II,
225;
Granville, I,
434-6;
Hester Stanhope,
41-2;
H. M. C. Dropmore, VII,
190-1;
Smith, I,
3;
Cornwallis III,
504. ,
Nicolas, V,
283;
Bamford,
223;
Auckland, IV,
183;
Wellesle
y,
1,
168-70;
Colchester, I.

" Some Say in wooden house he'll glide

Some say in air balloon,

E'en those who airy schemes deride

Agree his coming soon.

" Now honest people list to me,

Though income is but small,

I'll bet my wig to one Pen
ney

He
does not come at all."
¹

But those who imagined that Napoleon was bluffing were wrong. He had never been more in earnest in his life. And so were his fanatic followers. That November a
prame
was brought into Deal with thirty soldiers, splendidly equipped and full of confidence. They seemed neither low nor mortified at being stared at and questioned by their captors, and obviously felt no need to sham spirits. They simply stated with sublime assurance that they would soon be retaken and that the war would be over in a couple of months. Hester Stanhope, Pitt's niece who rode over from Walmer to see them, found them perfectly at ease and engaged, Frenchmanlike, in dressing their hair and attending to their persons, one pulling up a prodigious black stock over his chin, another giving a knowing air to a giant cocked hat with a horrid national cockade or "badge of rascality" in it. It caused her a thousand disquieting reflections. " Some people say they will never attempt to come here," she commented;
"I
differ from them. I have seen the almost impassable mountains they have marched armies across."
²

Around Christmas there were new alarms. For many weeks signs of activity had been noticed in Brest and the French Atlantic ports as well as at the Texel; both battleships and transports were known to be fitting for sea. It was believed that an expedition was preparing for Ireland, to sail either in conjunction with or as a diversion to the main invasion flotilla. This was a threat to which England was always sensitive, for Ireland was the Achilles heel in her armour, both moral and strategic. Orders were accordingly given that, in the event of the French warships escaping from Brest, the Channel Fleet was to rendezvous off the Lizard and follow them,
either to Ireland or up Channel to Boulogne. A reserve squadron was also

¹
Wheeler and Broadley, II,
315, 321;
I,
23

²
Hester Stanhope,
41-2.
The future Sir Harry Smith, then a lad of sixteen on guard with the Whittlesea Yeomanry at Norman Cross, described the insolent assurance of the French prisoners who bade him go back to his mama and eat more pudding. Smith, 1,3-

stationed under Sir Richard Calder between Mizen Head and the Durseys.
¹

As the last days of 1803 approached, conviction again grew that the French would hazard the attempt. "Bonaparte is so pledged to make an attack upon this country," wrote the Secretary of War, "th
at I do not well see how he can
avoid it."
²
Everything that was known of his character and desperate methods confirmed it. There was a widespread belief that the invasion would decide the fate of the war; Nelson, w
riting from his remote watchtowe
r off Toulon, trusted that the enemy of mankind would be cut off and peace follow. His friend, Lord Minto, was more far-seeing.
"I
do not participate in the wishes of those bold citizens and country gentlemen who are anxious that the French should come in a fortnight that we may get rid of the expense and trouble of preparation. Greater and severer trials are coming on us than perhaps this country expects. But," he added, "such is the spirit of the people that I am fully persuaded that, in spite of our Government and the grand scale of French preparation, we shall, though not without a long and arduous struggle, frustrate our enemies."
³

On the last day of the year it became known that the Channel Fleet had been driven from its station off Brest by a more than usually severe gale. Reports reaching the Prime Minister from Paris suggested that French troops were in motion towards the coast, that three sail of the line and seventy transports were waiting at the Texel and fifteen more with a hundred and fifty transports at Brest, and that Bonaparte was leaving at once for Boulogne. Nor were the British wrong in supposing that their enemy had not relinquished his project. A month earlier he had gazed long and earnestly at the English coast from the heights of Ambleteuse, made out the houses and bustle almost as clearly as the Calvary on Mount Valerien from the Tuileries, and pronounced the Channel a ditch that could be leapt by the bold. In digging the ground for his camp, medals of William the Conqueror had been found, and a battle-axe which had belonged to Caesar's army. The boat in which he sailed was chosen and christened with delicate tact
"Prince de Galle."
160,000 troops were to cross from northern France and Holland to the isle of Thanet, while naval expeditions from Brest and Rochefort drew off the English squadrons. Within four days of landing the victors would be in London. The
Moniteur
described how the inhabitants of Dover

1
Mahan,- II,
119-20;
Blockade of Brest,
I, xxix-xxxi,
120, 127-8, 166-7,
^l
7^>
210-11;
Fox, III,
431;
Colchester, I,
472;
Cornwallis-West,
398-9.

2
Wellesley, I,
169.

³
Minto, III,
302.

and Folkestone were already flying inland at the sight of the bonfires on the French cliffs.

Meanwhile in England the Volunteers, by now in the highest pitch of anticipation, exercised in the muddy fields and ditches around the capital and tore their uniforms in desperate assaults on hedge and briar. Should the blow fall to the south of the Thames, it was resolved that the King, accompanied by the Prime Minister and Secretary of War, should take up his station at Dartford: if to the north, at Chelmsford. The Queen and Court were to remove to Worcester, where the gold from the Bank was to be stored in the Cathedral. The Royal Arsenal was to be shipped from Woolwich to Birmingham by the Grand Junction Canal. All suspects were to be taken into preventative custody. Press accounts of troop movements and military operations were
to be restricted to official co
mmuniqués
issued twice daily; editors who disobeyed were to be arrested and their presses impounded.

Farther north the alarms were naturally taken more calmly. On January 15th Dorothy Wordsworth reported that she and her Westmorland neighbours had given up thinking about invasion, though the Grasmere Volunteers passed the door twice weekly in their red coats on their way to exercise at Ambleside. But a fortnight later, across the border, the butler at Wilton Lodge threw open the drawing-room door with the announcement "Supper is on the table— and the beacons are lighted on the hills!"
¹
And as the fierce red light blazed on Dunion, the first incredulity gave place to indignation and that in turn to action as the whole countryside poured out—" a' the sea fencibles and the land fencibles and the volunteers and the yeomanry . . . driving to Fairport as hard as horse and man can gang." At Jedburgh, where the drums were beating to arms, Lord Minto found the streets crowded with Volunteers and bright as day with the lights that the people had put in their windows. Walter Scott remembered in after years how the men of Liddesdale, seeing the distant peaks of fire, requisitioned every horse in the countryside and rode over hill and dale without drawing bridle to the rendezvous at Kelso, which they entered to the tune of

" O wha dare meddle wi' me,

And wha dare meddle wi' me!

My name is little Jack Elliot,

And wha dare meddle wi' me!"

¹
Minto, III,
418.
At the outbreak of the present war Miss Margaret Rawlings, the actress, told the writer how a London charlady announced the first early morning airraid alarm with a friendly "'Ere the
y are, Miss, and 'cre's yer tea
"

At Selkirk Lord Home called on the Volunteers he commanded to sing the old song which had never failed to excite their fathers' enthusiasm: "Up with the souters of Selkirk and down with th
e. Earl of Hume!" and, on their
pleading ignorance of it, sang it for them Himself. And in all Teviotdale and Liddlesdale only one man failed to answer the muster roll.
¹