The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (10 page)

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This dilemma was first encountered in 1689, when Louis XIV’s first objective was to overthrow William III and restore James II and thereby fracture the Anglo–Dutch front which stood in the way of his expansionist policies in Europe. In terms of numbers of ships, France was capable of challenging both powers in the Channel for, since the early 1660s, Louis’s minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, had masterminded an ambitious policy of naval rearmament. A mercantilist, he had a vision of France’s future as a colonial, commercial power which, like Britain, would draw its strength from international trade. His master was more conventional; Louis preferred to channel his nation’s energies into the piecemeal creation of an extended France whose frontiers would enclose the Low Countries and the Rhine Valley.

The French attempt to dethrone William and detach Britain from its alliance with the Netherlands was marked by missed opportunities and mismanagement. The Catholic James II’s strongest support was among the Gaelic-speaking Catholic Irish, but campaigns in Ireland required regular transfusions of French men and equipment. Between 1689 and 1690 there were two French expeditions to Ireland, neither of which were seriously impeded by the Royal Navy. The initial Anglo–Dutch response to this threat was fumbling and, after the defeat of a British fleet at Beachy Head in June 1690, control of the Channel was temporarily lost.

No attempt was made by the French to follow up this advantage, and in 1691 the French navy lost the initiative. There were no further convoys to Ireland where James II’s cause soon withered. 1692 saw the Anglo–Dutch fleet secure the upper hand with twin victories at Barfleur and La Hogue in May, when a French fleet, outnumbered two to one, lost twelve battleships, a quarter of its strength. The French navy had not brought Britain to its knees and Louis, realising that further expenditure on ships would bring few returns, cut the naval budget by two-thirds. His fleet was already under strain because of a permanent shortage of skilled sailors, which was wholly the consequence of his foolish revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 by which he withdrew religious toleration from Protestants. Thousands of seamen from France’s Atlantic ports, where Protestantism had been strong, chose exile, many coming to England. For many years to come, the French navy had to draw on a comparatively small pool of trained sailors for its crews.
3
Matters were made worse after 1692, and again in the 1700s, by the official policy of keeping fleets in harbour which preserved fighting ships but deprived their crews of valuable experience at sea.

After 1692 the French wisely shunned fleet actions and turned instead to a war of commerce raiding intended to undermine Anglo–Dutch trade. Despite a handful of audacious commanders, like Jean Bart, this war of attrition in the end failed to produce the expected result. There was, however, one nasty shock for the Allies. Between 1689 and 1691, French pressure in home waters had forced the Royal Navy to withdraw its presence from the Mediterranean, which damaged Britain’s trade with Italy and the Levant. An attempt to reassert British naval power in the Mediterranean was made in 1693 and ended in calamity when a heavily escorted convoy of 400 merchantmen was attacked in Lagos Bay in southern Portugal. A hundred ships were lost, but the French again chose not to exploit their success. During 1694–95, the French Mediterranean fleet remained bottled up in Toulon harbour and its adversaries resumed their command of that sea.

Outside Europe, naval operations were limited. At this time, French overseas trade was not great, although this did not stop hundreds of British privateers, including the infamous Captain Kidd, from seeking official letters of marque to attack French merchant ships. In 1694, an eight-strong squadron of warships sailed for the West Indies with orders to interrupt French seaborne trade, raid French islands and burn plantations. Much damage was done, but a ‘violent and uncommon distemper’ struck down the crews of this flotilla and brought the campaign to a premature end. So many seamen died on one ship that there were not enough left to man it properly and it ran aground on the Florida shoals.
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Neither side gained a decisive advantage at sea between 1689 and 1697, although the Allies could claim some satisfaction at having seen off the French challenge in the Channel and the Mediterranean. On land the story was similar, and both sides, exhausted and war-weary, made peace. It was in fact only a truce since Louis, through diplomatic manipulation, secured, by 1700, what amounted to an amalgamation of France with Spain.

It was unthinkable that Britain could stand by and allow France to take possession of Spain, its Italian territories, and, most importantly, its transatlantic empire. From the start, Louis was determined to engross all Spanish commerce, from which the British and Dutch were to be excluded. This was a disaster for Britain; markets would be lost and command of the seas pass to the Franco–Spanish fleet. War began in 1702 with Britain as the lynchpin and paymaster of the Grand Alliance whose other members included the Netherlands, Austria and Prussia, all of whom wanted to resist French domination in Europe.

The decisive battles of the War of the Spanish Succession were fought on land by the armies directed by John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough. Most of the men he commanded, whether British, Dutch or German, were paid for by Britain which, in 1711, had 171,000 men on its payroll. British seapower alone paid a peripheral part in this conflict which was marked by no decisive, full-scale fleet actions. Nevertheless, in terms of the future use of the navy, the war provided useful lessons and experience.

From the beginning, British strategy aimed at the elimination of Franco–Spanish power in the Mediterranean. This required the acquisition of a naval base in the region so that men-o’-war could be armed, victualled and overhauled without having to sail back to ports in Britain. To this end, Gibraltar was occupied and held in the teeth of a Franco–Spanish counterattack (1702–04) and Minorca, with its deep-water harbour at Port Mahon, was seized in 1708. Both acquisitions were of tremendous importance, for British fleets could now be permanently stationed in the Mediterranean and British political influence exerted over its small maritime states.

As a token of Britain’s new position in this area, Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell’s fleet cruised in the western Mediterranean in 1703 to demonstrate to local rulers that Britain was now a force to be reckoned with. One, the Duke of Savoy, was so impressed that he changed sides and joined the Grand Alliance.
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The intimidatory value of a fleet was quickly appreciated. In 1708 the Duke of Manchester, Queen Anne’s ambassador to Venice, commenting on the uncooperative attitude of the Pope, observed, ‘I wish our fleet would make him a visit, that he may know what a Queen of Great Britain is.’ Such a show was hardly needed; in 1705 Barcelona was occupied after an amphibious landing, and three years later a similar attack on Toulon did severe damage to the French fleet anchored there.

These enterprises were part of a larger strategy, warmly endorsed by Marlborough, by which France was driven to split her land forces to counter threats in southern Europe, including an invasion of Spain itself by an army under Lord Peterborough. His campaign, like Wellington’s a century later, could not have been sustained without the Royal Navy’s domination of the Atlantic and Mediterranean.

Beyond European waters, the Royal Navy undertook a number of small-scale operations against French and Spanish shipping and colonies with mixed results. A small squadron, under the command of Vice-Admiral John Benbow, a determined and courageous officer, cruised in the West Indies and severely mauled a French flotilla in a six-day engagement off Santa Marta in April 1702. Following what would become Nelson’s dictum that an officer who attacked his adversary without hesitation could do no wrong, Benbow took the offensive, but was deserted by four of his seven subordinate commanders. Towards the end of the action, his right leg was shattered by chain shot, but he remained on his quarterdeck in a hastily constructed cradle and continued to direct the fighting. He died some months later from fever, having had his leg amputated. Two of his cowardly officers were subsequently court-martialled and shot, while Benbow lived on in a popular ballad as a golden example of the tenacity, sense of duty and fighting spirit that Britain expected from its sailors:

Brave Benbow lost his legs by chain shot, by chain shot,

Brave Benbow lost his legs by chain shot.

Brave Benbow lost his legs,

But on his stumps he begs,

‘Fight on, my English lads, ’tis our lot, ’tis our lot.’

Benbow’s virtues were also displayed by Rear-Admiral Sir Charles Wager, who encountered a Spanish treasure fleet off Porto Bello in May 1708. Abandoned by two timorous commanders, he went straight for the enemy and, firing broadsides at close range, sank one battleship that was stuffed with bullion and crippled another. A representation of the battle, carved in marble, was later set on his flamboyant tomb in Westminster Abbey.

Wager’s destruction of the bullion ships, like the seizure of another treasure fleet at Vigo on the Portuguese coast in 1703 (some of the captured silver was used to mint coins which were stamped ‘Vigo’), hampered the Franco-Spanish war effort. What was too easily forgotten by the Allies, who naturally celebrated such coups, was that nearly all the convoys of precious metals from Spanish America did reach their destination. Even so, it was clear by 1710 that the two sides were evenly matched on land and that France, thrown back on the defensive and close to bankruptcy, had been fought to a standstill.

In Britain a new, Tory ministry adopted a strategy which, it was imagined, would bring the country advantages in the form of conquered French colonies. Successful amphibious attacks were made on French settlements in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. A more ambitious project to capture Quebec in 1711 went awry because of careless planning and ignorance of the fogs and shoals of the St Lawrence River.

Peace was made in 1714 at Utrecht where France recognised continued Spanish independence. Britain was rewarded with Gibraltar and Minorca, confirming her ascendancy in the Mediterranean, and Nova Scotia and the grant of the
asiento,
an official licence that permitted one ship a year to trade with the Spanish American colonies. The war had marked Britain’s coming of age as a European and a global power, a status which owed everything to her fleet of 124 ships, nearly twice the strength of the combined Franco–Spanish navies. While her adversaries and the Dutch had been debilitated by twelve years of conflict, British overseas trade had actually increased. This achievement had been in large part the result of the 1708 Cruisers and Convoys Act which bound the navy to allocate warships to protect merchantmen against privateers and commerce raiders, a duty which, by the close of the war, occupied two-thirds of the navy’s strength.

*   *   *

From 1714 to 1739 Britain and its colonies enjoyed a period of peace, domestic tranquillity and economic growth. Relations with France were outwardly cordial, but many Frenchmen were deeply apprehensive about the scope of Britain’s global ambitions. ‘The financial power of the English … gets every day larger and more ambitious,’ observed a French official in 1733, seemed poised to extinguish his country’s own expanding trade. Commercial competition between the two nations was therefore keen, in particular in North America, the Caribbean and on the east coast of India, where France was extending its network of trading posts, much to the alarm of the East India Company.

It was Spanish high-handedness rather than fears of French enterprise which led to war in November 1739. For the past five years, the Spanish authorities in America had been cracking down on what, with good reason, they considered abuses of the
asiento
contract by British merchants. The attempts of the
guada-costas
(customs officers) to stem the flow of contraband led to violent incidents when British ships were boarded, searched and, in many cases, their captains and cargoes arrested. Most famously, one zealous
guarda-costa
sliced off the ear of Captain Jenkins of the
Rebecca
and suggested that he took the organ to George II in language that was too coarse to be repeated in the Commons. When MPs debated this and other outrages in March 1739, the mercantile interest clamoured for war. They claimed that Britain’s entire transatlantic commerce would be ruined unless Spain was taught a sharp lesson.

National pride had been bruised and one member contrasted ‘The mean Submission of Great Britain’ with ‘the triumphant pride, and stubborn Haughtiness of Spain’.

There was a broad principle at stake according to William Pitt, the future prime minister. ‘It is vain to negotiate and make treaties’, he argued, ‘if there is not Dignity and Vigour to enforce the observance of them.’
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It was clear, at least from the perspective of the Commons chamber, that Spain had failed to uphold her obligations to Britain and therefore needed to be reminded of them in a way that would deter any future backsliding. The navy was the obvious means of bringing home to Spain the folly of meddling with British trade. The doctrine of the corrective use of seapower which later, and after many applications, would be known as gunboat diplomacy was born. Most of the war party were unconcerned with the surgical use of seapower to punish Spain; they wanted a rerun of the campaigns of Drake and Morgan with warships returning to British ports crammed with the silver and gold of the Spanish Indies. Drawing attention to the presence of large numbers of army and naval officers among those calling for war, Henry Pelham, the MP for Sussex who became prime minister in 1744, tartly recalled how, in the last war, ‘the Officers and Sailors were the Gainers, but the public was not’.
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He was probably right; the lure of prize money was as strong as the urge to uphold national prestige.

BOOK: The Rise and Fall of the British Empire
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