Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (19 page)

Napoleon's recall of his warships from San Domingo left the French West Indies at his enemy's mercy. Though unable to tackle the larger islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, a small amphibious force from Barbados under Major General Grinfield and Commodore Samuel Hood captured St. Lucia and Tobago, while the garrison of Newfoundland seized St. Pierre and Miquelon. Later Grinficld repecupied Demerara, Berbice and Essequibo—the Dutch settlements which had been restored to Holland at the Peace. Surinam followed in the spring of 1804, though a naval attempt on Curacao failed for lack of co-operation between the Services. Farther north the isolated remnant of the French army in San Domingo surrendered to the British as the only alternative to massacre at the hands of the negroes.

In India, also, where Napoleon had designed a new empire, the war only increased British power. It gave the high-spirited Governor-General, Lord Wellesley, the opportunity, denied him by a timid home Government and a Board of parsimonious merchants, to root up the last vestiges of French influence. Even before news of the resumption of war reached him, he had refused to hand over Pondicherry to Decaen's expedition. Now, while their plans to attack him were incomplete, he struck at the French-trained armies of the restless Mahratta chiefs. In two campaigns, waged many hundreds of miles apart, his troops, during the autumn of 1803, captured with only a fraction of their force the Mogul capital of Delhi and overran Hindustan and the Deccan. On September 23rd his thirty-four-year-old brother, Arthur Wellesley," clashed with his fiery few" and won at Assaye a victory which, though little regarded in England at the time, was to help shape the future of the world for a century. Five weeks' later at Laswari the Commander-in-Chief, Gerard Lake, triumphed in one of the hardest-fought and bloodiest battles in Indian history. These exploits, which only became known at home in the ensuing spring, were achieved by a few thousand British infantry and Sepoy auxiliaries on malarial plains and in trackless jungles under a burning sun. "The English," wrote a Mahratta warrior after the storming of Ahmadnagar, " are a strange people and their General a wonderful man. They came here in-the morning, looked at the pettah-wall, walked over it, killed all the garrison and returned to breakfast!" Yet though
their speed, boldness in strikin
g, discipline and fierce tenacity astonished an India long used to war, their victories depended in the last resort on their country's control of remote oceans whose very existence was unknown to the myriads whose lives it transformed.
¹

Yet Napoleon by his impatient fury achieved one thing. He had scared Addington on to the defensive. So long as Britain left Europe to its fate, the initiative remained with France. From the Pyrenees to the Vistula the cowed nations fawned on her. Germany, betrayed by Hapsburg fear and Prussian treachery, lay divided at her feet. South of the Alps, where only the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies retained a nominal independence, Italy was equally enslaved. Godoy's Spain was Bonaparte's lackey. A suspicious and equivocal Russia, having no hope of England, seemed ready to co-operate with France in the partition of the Turkish Empire. And everywhere the rising middle-classes, sickened by the frustration of corrupt

¹
For the effect of these conquests on the mind of a French observer, see Castlereagh,

rulers, welcomed the dictator's virile New Order as the best hope for the future.

For, though Addington's England might boast of her power to save herself, she could not save others. By first reducing the Army at the Peace to less than 150,000 men—a number barely sufficient to garrison Ireland and the Empire—and then enrolling vast numbers of Volunteers and Militiamen in preference to Regulars, the Government had deprived itself of its only offensive weapon. In its obsession with invasion it ignored what Pitt and Dundas had learnt from experience : that to a military striking force, ready for use whenever and wherever the foe should expose weakness, British sea-power could give a range and effect out of all proportion to its size.

By the end of the earlier war a properly trained and mobile British army had captured the two chief fortified islands of the Mediterranean, overrun Egypt and compelled the surrender of a numerically superior French army: Used in conjunction with the Fleet, it had shown, as under Marlborough, how England might challenge a tyrant's hegemony of the Continent.

But the Army, unable like the Navy to draw on the flower of a skilled profession, depended for recruitment on the poor man's craving for drink and a frugal Treasury's bounty. These sources the Administration had diverted to other purposes. Even the much-vaunted Army of Reserve Act of July, 1803 produced, after allowing for desertions, only 34,500 men of whom less than 8000 took the bounty and enlisted in the Line. Suffering
13,000
casualties—mostly through sickness—the Regular Army during the first nine months of war dwindled rather than grew. Though the Secretary-for-War boasted that he could call on 700,000 men to defend the country, he failed to add how few were fit to contend with the victors of Rivoli. Forgetting every lesson of the past, Ministers had fallen into the most elementary of all the wartime errors of parliamentary politicians: that of imagining that soldiers could be made merely by putting men into uniform.

It was therefore beside the point for little Spencer Perceval, the Attorney-General, to hold up Britain in the House of Commons as an example to the Continental Powers. If she was to offer them any incentive to shake off their chains, she had to do more than sit back and thank God she was not as they. When a great military Power has broken bounds on the Continent its neighbours have never taken kindly to insular exhortations to resist so long as, secure behind her moat, England has lacked means to assist them. Splendid isolation can never be the latter's final word to an enslaved world.

With forty millions and the Revolutionary dynamic at his back

Napoleon could sooner or later leave England high and dry. No colonial acquisitions in the under-inhabited outer Continents could avail so small a nation unless she could find allies and bases nearer home; indeed the conquest of malarial sugar islands only drained still further her supplies of trained man-power. In the end even her Navy might be outbuilt by an adversary with a larger population and coast-line. Keeping the seas in all weathers, its ships were constantly exposed to tempest and strain and its dockyards to a burden of repair which restricted new construction. Napoleon's ships, on the other hand, remained in harbour, so that, once arrears in maintenance had been made good, his yards could be employed wholly on new construction.

There was a further defect in the British blockade. To make it effective an island moored across the trade routes of western Europe had to extend its naval stranglehold across the Mediterranean. Only by sealing the southern shores of the Continent could she deny her foe a bridgehead into Asia and Africa. But the island bases on which she had hitherto depended for this—Corsica, Elba, Minorca—had been relinquished at the Peace or before, and, though she held Gibraltar and Malta, neither was of much use against the French arsenal at Toulon.
¹
Only Nelson's inexhaustible resource enabled Britain to maintain her Mediterranean blockade at all. Dependent for supplies on the neutral islands of Sardinia and Sicily—neither of which was safe from French attack—and on a Spain which, lying athwart his communications, might at any moment enter the war against him, the British Admiral's position was one of growing jeopardy. The whole Italian mainland was under French control, with St. Cyr's army waiting in Calabria to pounce on Sicily, Greece or Egypt.

From his first arrival, therefore, Nelson repeatedly appealed to London for troops to protect Sicily and Sardinia. "I have made up my mind," he told Lady Hamilton, " that it is part of the plan of that Corsican scoundrel to conquer the Kingdom of Naples.
...
If the poor King remonstrates, he will call it a war and declare a conquest." The only certain remedy was to forestall him by occupying Messina. But the Government was too concerned with securing England against invasion to spare the troops. It even recalled from Malta the last remnants of the small but well-trained army with which Abercromby had conquered Egypt two years before.
²

¹
"Malta and Toulon arc entirely different services; when I am forced to send a ship there I never see her under two months."—Mahan,
Nelson,
II,
195.

²
Nicolas, V,
82-3, 85, 96-7, 108
-n,
13147,
174, 193.

Beyond Sicily was the Levant and the misgoverned provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Here was a vacuum at the point where Europe opened on to Asia. In the course of nature a vacuum has to be filled, and it was plain that Napoleon meant to fill it. Though his sea passage to the Levant was barred by Nelson's fleet, there was an alternative route along the shores of the Adriatic and Aegean. With Austria's neutrality secured, a Franco-Russian partition of the Balkans might turn the whole British position in the Orient.
"I
cannot help thinking," wrote Nelson, " that Russia and France understand each other about the Turkish dominions. If so, Egypt will be the price."
¹
And Egypt, guarding the door to Africa and the overland route to India, Napoleon had once described as the most important country in the world.

At heart, even though they could not see its dangers, the British people were tiring of the defensive. Whatever the temper of their politicians, their natural instinct was to attack. Under the right leaders they always did so. Commodore Hood and his "Centaurs," finding that the barren and precipitous Diamond Rock interfered with their blockade of Martinique, hoisted guns up its supposedly inaccessible cliffs*
²
and used it to impede the' main channel to the principal port of the French Antilles. Held by a young lieutenant and a hundred seamen and officially rated in the Navy List as His Majesty's sloop
Diamond Rock,
it defied for more than two years every attempt to reduce it. At the other side of the world twenty-seven English merchantmen, sailing towards the Malacca Straits from China, encountered a French battleship and four cruisers off the island of Pulo Aor. Unescorted and armed only with 18-pounders, they formed line of battle at the senior captain's signal, and behaved so aggressively that the raiders, fearing a trap, turned tail and left them to pursue their way unmolested. It was characteristic of British practice that when the victorious ships anchored in the Downs after a six months' voyage, though their leader was knighted and given a pension by the East India Company, their crews were pressed as a matter of course into the Royal Navy.
³

To such a people a purely passive role was demoralising. Once they had awoken from the Volunteer Colonel's dream of a speedy

¹
To Addington,
16th
July,
1803.
Nicholas, V,
136.
Young Lord Aberdeen, who was in the Morea that autumn, snared these suspicions—a fact which many years later may have helped to brin
g about the Crimean War, See C.
F.
P., I,
330.

²
"Were you to see
how along a dire and, I had almost said, a perpendicular acclivity the sailors hang in clusters hauling up a four-and-twenty pounder by hawsers, you would wonder. They appear like mice hauling up a
little sausage. . . . Believe me
, I shall never take my hat oft" for anything less than a British seaman."—
Naval Chronicle,
XII,
205.

³
Farrin
gton, II,
272.

invasion, culminating in Bonaparte's death in a Kentish meadow and a triumphant peace, their talent for grumbling and faction reasserted itself. Already Fox—"turning his huge understanding loose,"—was deploring the war and pooh-poohing the invasion.

A timorous self-interest was not enough to inspire the English. Like their own St. George they needed a dragon to assail. It was because he understood this that Pitt was destined to lead them through the impending crisis of the war. He embodied the national will to the offensive. Unlike Addington, who at one moment expected invasion and the next the automatic collapse of France, he saw England's task not as "how to avoid defeat but how to inflict it."
¹
Taught by the humiliations and evacuations of the First Coalition, he understood the overriding importance of the initiative. With his friend, Lord Melville—the Harry Dundas of old days—he stood for the Chatham tradition: of an England striking across oceans and inspiring and sustaining a Grand Alliance to free Europe.

Though Pitt exercising his Kentish Volunteers was, as Melville said, "very usefully and creditably employed," it was scarcely in the way his countrymen wished. Few after nine months of war any longer believed in "happy Britain's guardian gander," as Canning called the Prime Minister. Gillray caricatured him with cocked hat and toy sword trembling like a jelly at the sight of Bonaparte, and even his followers now rocked with laughter whenever he rose in the House.
²
The Grenvilles, Cannings, Windhams and Foxites, forgetting their differences, were always denouncing the torpor, timidity and complacency of the King's Ministers. The latter's proposal to defend the Thames with blockhouses evoked Canning's sprightliest verse: