Years of Victory 1802 - 1812 (30 page)

There was not a moment to lose. The intelligence from Suabia and Italy was too grave to be disregarded. Austria plainly meant business; the Russian hordes were marching south; England's sinister intrigues were coming to a head. Before leaving Paris Napoleon had dictated ultimatums to the Courts of Vienna and Naples threatening them with invasion unless all troop movements ceased immediately. They had still to be sent off, and on August
7th
he ordered them to be held up a few days longer. At the same time he summoned the Imperial Guard to Boulogne.

¹
Collingwood,
107;
Corbe
tt,
208;
Mahan,
Nelson,
II,
309-10;
Nicolas, VI,
472-3,
475,
478.

Next day he countermanded the order. Nelson was reported from Cadiz to be back in Europe and to have been seen sailing north on July 25th. For once Napoleon was in two minds. Talleyrand, convinced that he would have to face a superior British concentration in the Channel, was urging him not to risk a crossing. Yet the chance of destroying England, if not promptly taken, might pass for ever.

Then on the same day, August 8th, the Emperor learnt that Villeneuve had entered Vigo, claiming to have defeated Calder. He at once proclaimed a victory and sent him peremptory instructions to hurry north. Until the 13th his mind seemed set on invasion. Then news arrived th
at Villeneuve, having reached Fe
rrol, had disregarded orders and entered the harbour.
¹
Beside himself with rage, Napoleon ordered a military concentration against Austria. Yet, still hoping against hope, he dashed off letter after letter to Decres and his errant Admiral, exhorting the latter
at
all costs to put to sea, brush aside the British naval forces in his way and enter the Channel. "The English," he wrote, "are not so numerous as you suppose. They are everywhere in a state of uncertainty and alarm. . . . Never
did a fleet face danger for a
grander object; never soldiers and seamen risk their lives for a nobler end. To destroy the Power which for six centuries had oppressed France we can all die without regret." Allemand, he added, was cruising off Ferrol, Ganteaume was waiting at Brest, the British had only four ships of the line in the Downs, and these were being harassed by French
prames
and gunboats. As for their main fleets, they were far away: Nelson and Collingwood were in the Straits, Cochrane in the West Indies, and others in the Indian Ocean. The plans to disperse them had succeeded: the army of invasion was waiting: only the Combined Fleet had still to fulfil its duty.

And on that very day, unknown to Napoleon, Villeneuve put to sea. No Admiral ever sailed with a stronger sense of fear and doom. His ships were short of stores and water, their crews decimated by scurvy and dysentery, and the ill-trained Spaniards in a state of almost open mutiny. "I will not venture to describe our condition," he told the French Minister of Marine, "it is frightful."

For neither Villeneuve nor Gravina had the slightest belief in Napoleon's theory that the British Navy was in the Antipodes. "The plan of operations could not seem better," the Spanish Admiral wrote to Decres, "it was divine. But to-day it is sixty days since we

¹
Half the Combined Meet under Gravina had entered the port before Villeneuve, receiving Napoleon's prohibition, anchored with the remainder in Corunna Bay.—Corbett,
220
.

left Martinique, and the English have had plenty of time to send warning to Europe and to reinforce their Ferrol squadron.
...
It seems certain that on our leaving here they will give us battle and, by using scouts to warn their Ushant squadron, force a second fight on us before we can reach Brest." For Gravina saw the false assumption in Napoleon's calculations: that a fleet could pass through the Western Approaches without being so mauled in the process as to be useless for further operations. Being a Spaniard, he felt free to point it out.
¹

Before leaving Corunna Bay Villeneuve sent out a frigate to find Allemand, whose squadron had left Rochefort in mid-July for a secret rendezvous with him off Finisterre. By a series of almost miraculous chances Allemand, though moving in waters swarming with British ships, had hitherto evaded detection and was at that moment cruising between Ushant and Finisterre in search of Villeneuve. But the latter's frigate
never reached him. On August 10
th she fell in with a slightly smaller English- cruiser, provocatively disguised as a sloop, and, on attacking, was captured with all hands. By the time the Combined Fleet reached the open sea, Allemand, having no word of it and finding the enemy everywhere, had left his station and run for Vigo.

For what Allemand found all round him and Villeneuve was sailing into the midst of, was the instinctive reaction of centuries. The British squadrons were assembling automatically in the very path that Napoleon had ordered the hapless Villeneuve to tread. On August 9th, discovering that the Combined Fleet had contacted the French and Spanish ships in Ferrol, Calder had raised the blockade and hastened northwards. On the 14th he joined Cornwallis off Ushant, a few hours after Rear-Admiral Stirling had also come in with his division. And at six o'clock next evening the Channel Fleet, already twenty-seven sail of the line including ten three-deckers, was joined by Nelson with twelve more. For learning on the 13th, while bound for his Scillies rendezvous, that Ireland was safe, that ardent officer had at once altered course to bring his fleet to Cornwallis.

It was what Villeneuve most feared. " Your Lordship each night forms a part of his dreams," Captain Bayntun wrote to Nelson.
²
It was an obsession that transcended ordinary reason. For as he hurried from sea to sea and port to port on his pitiful five months' mission, the French Admiral felt he was struggling against more than ordinary mortal strength and ingenuity. In Nelson this

¹
Desbriere, V,
775.

²
Add. MSS.
34930, 21st
June,
1805
.

honourable, brave but mediocre man had encountered one of the great, elemental forces of nature. Being a Frenchman, he had the imagination to see it.

In such a mood he left the shelter of Corunna Bay on August 13th with twenty-nine sail of the line and ten cruisers. Of the former fourteen were Spanish, and more than a third had not been to sea for several years. Only one, the
Principe de Asturias,
was a three-decker. The crews were largely made up of landsmen and soldiers. "Our naval tactics," Villeneuve wrote to Decres, "are antiquated, we know nothing but how to place ourselves in line, and that is just what the enemy wants." The latter, he reported, was watching his every movement from the horizon; evasion was impossible. Forgetting his master's objurgations, he had already all but made up his mind to take his final option and seek refuge in Cadiz. For anything was better than to face the certain destruction lurking in the north.

Though he sailed on a north-easterly course, the French Admiral never made any attempt to penetrate the British defences. At the first sight of a sail the entire fleet went about and continued on the opposite tack until the horizon was clear. Its only progress into the bay was by night. Every hour, as it edged away from the dreaded north, it got farther into the west. There was no sign of Allemand, Brest was utterly unattainable without a battle, at any moment Calder and perhaps Nelson might appear over the horizon. Far from dispersing the British, the Grand Design, as Villeneuve had foreseen from the first, had concentrated them at the point where there was no avoiding them. A gale was blowing up from the north-east, his ships were ill-found, the soldiers and landsmen were seasick. As darkness fell on August 15th, he abandoned his enterprise and fled to Cadiz.

CHAPTER
SIX

Trafalgar

"To regard Trafalgar as having been fought purely for the security of these British Islands is to misjudge the men who designed it, and, above all, the men who fought it with such sure and lucid comprehension. For them, from first to last, the great idea was not how to avoid defeat, but how to inflict it. England had found herself again."

Sir Julian Corbett,
The Campaign of Trafalgar.

O

n
August 18th, 1805, Nelson anchored off Portsmouth in the
Victory.
Having chased Villeneuve for 14,000 miles and failed to find him, he was depressed and anxious about his reception. But the waiting crowds on the ramparts were cheering, and all the way to the capital the enthusiasm continued. Without knowing it the tired, ailing Admiral had become a legend. Forgotten during his long Mediterranean vigil and all but reviled when the French fleet escaped from Toulon, his dash to save the West Indies had caught the country's imagination. Once more, as in the old days before his passion for Lady Hamilton and his parting from his wife had sullied his fame, he was "our hero of the Nile"—the wonderful Admiral whose name had swept England's foes from the seas. The unexpected popularity was like sunshine to him. As he walked down Piccadilly the people flocked about him: it was affecting, wrote an eye-witness, to see the wonder, admiration and love of every one, gentle and simple; "it was beyond anything represented in a play or a poem of fame." The West India merchants voted him thanks for having saved their possessions; but for his modesty, thought the
Naval Ch
ronicle,
he was in danger of being turned into a demi-god.

The popular enthusiasm was partly the outcome of strain. Towards the end of July the fear of invasion had again become a reality: the enemy was known to be preparing feverishly on the opposite coast. Boulogne was reported packed with waiting barges: the Combined Fleet was at large and bound for the Channel. On August 10th the Admiralty warned Cornwallis that an attempt at a crossing was to be expected during the spring tides. The Volunteers were . called out, all leave was stopped, and at Shorncliffe Sir John Moore's men practised repelling invaders breast-high in the water. Once again the beacons were lit in th
e North; Walter Scott, holiday-
making in Cumberland, galloped a hundred miles in a day to attend the muster at Dalkeith.
¹

Villeneuve threatened not only England's shores but the merchant fleets by which in the last resort she lived. The outgoing East India trade was detained in Plymouth: the Lisbon-Oporto, long overdue, could not leave the Portuguese ports. Out in the Atlantic two other homecoming convoys were in danger: the sugar fleet from the West Indies which Nelson had saved in June, and, somewhere between St. Helena and the Soundings, a fabulously rich fleet from China and India. Sailing in its solitary escort was the retiring Governor-General's brother, the young "Sepoy" general, Sir Arthur Wellesley, who had done such wo
nderful tilings against the Mah
rattas. The threat to the trades hamstrung the Navy as well as the City, for until the press-gangs could seize their crews the Admiralty could not man the new battleships which Barham had been fitting out in such haste.

The strain showed itself in a venomous outcry against Calder, whose failure to destroy the Combined Fleet was denounced as the cause of all this anxiety and danger. Instead of the peerage to which he had looked forward, he was threatened with a Court Martial and a halter. "We are all raving mad at Sir Robert Calder," wrote one lady from the comfortable security of a Midland country house, "I could have done better myself. Charles says he ought to have been hanged."
²

To Pitt and Barham the news of Nelson's return was something more than a popular hero's homecoming. It was the chance to resume the offensive. Believing that the country's best hope of salvation lay in attack, they had sent out Calder, like Drake, to destroy the Combined Fleet off the Spanish coast. He had failed, and they and their Admirals had fallen back on the defensive. Now, by so swiftly bringing the Mediterranean Fleet to the Channel Fleet, Nelson had given them the strength not only to defend the Western Approaches but to counter-attack.

Everything depended on their doing so. For the enemy had effected a concentration at the most decisive point on England's lifeline. Whether Villeneuve was still in Ferrol or at large in the Bay, he lay athwart the sea route to the Mediterranean and the Indies.

¹
Festing,
125;
Minto,
356-7;
Corbe
tt,
249-50;
Granville, II,
99, 102;
H. M. C,
Various Collections,
VI,
410;
J. W. Fortescue
,
The County Lieutenancies and the Army,
1803-1814;
John Buchan,
Scott,
87.

²
Paget Brothers,
39;
Lord Coleridge, III; Barham, III,
259;
Minto, III,
366;
Granville, II,
99, 106.
Captain Codrington thought these strictures on a brave officer with forty-five years' unblemished service monstrous.—Codrington,
54.